My Core 2 Duo Merom laptop was sadly unbearably sluggish on Windows 7 with a mechanical drive even with indexing and background services disabled, even at browsing files and such (and merely laggy with a SSHD mechanical drive with flash cache), though I hear Penryn CPUs are faster (and perhaps desktops are faster than laptops). The computer performs much better on a non-JS-based Linux DE like MATE (as opposed to GNOME Shell and plasmashell), though taskbar window previews are black (probably it doesn't work on an anemic GMA 965). I swear Xfce on a 2-core Ivy Bridge laptop with iGPU and SATA SSD, feels just as fast as KDE on a 6-core Zen 3 desktop with non-Nvidia GPU, at file management, Konsole, Telegram/nheko chatting, and PDF reading, until you open a browser or Electron app or run a modern optimizing compiler.

Oddly, with Windows 7 on the Core 2 Duo, the taskbar would randomly stop updating (I think it stopped happening after moving the same hard drive into a newer laptop?), and I got no end of driver issues: the touchpad would stop responding on the lock screen or logged in after sleep-wake, and audio would randomly stop playing until I restarted audiodg.exe. As far as I can remember, none of these issues happen on my Ivy Bridge laptop, where I'm clinging for life onto Windows 7 (the last version with a soul) for as long as I can keep apps running... though I'm getting rather tired of Tailscale creating a new network adapter and asking for home/work/public on every reboot.