The swappiness changes seemed to make a difference for me. I have not yet tried the suggested zram change and they may already be enabled in the rom....the swappiness change was not.
The swappiness change made a world of difference on my Compaq Presario x1000! I am also planning a CPU upgrade on it... Got a bunch of old Pentium M's sitting around that are a bit faster than its paltry 1.3GHz chip.
Current LXLE systems:
Dell Inspiron 530 - Intel Core2 Duo E7300 2.66Ghz, 4GB DDR2 RAM, ATI Radeon HD 4350, ViewSonic 19" 1280x1024 and Benq 17" 1280 x 1024.
IBM Thinkpad R51, Intel Pentium M 1.6GHz 2MB L2 Cache, 2GB DDR RAM, Mobility Radeon 7500 GPU
Dell Latitude D620, Intel Core Duo 1.66GHz, 2GB DDR2 RAM, Nvidia Quadro 110M