My Linux Mint is Debian Edition, meaning, afaik, that it would lean towards a tad more speed than the Ubuntu-based release.
Bodhi is v 1.4 (not the latest, it's still based on Ubuntu Lucid!) with a 3.0 kernel, but I have no idea what these version numbers say about its performance - only that Enlightenment, being even lighter than LXDE, is the fastest desktop I know, and Bodhi is generally on the super slim and fast end of distros.
Still this discrepancy in performance between the 2 distros, even though on the same HDD, seems too big to be just software-related.

I guess I'll go ahead and repartition. If the problem is really just the misalignment, it means what I need is not a fresh OS install, hence no need to costumize everything from scratch (I hate it when that becomes necessary, it's so much extra work, and you never get it back the way it was before...), so I can just create an image and restore it after the repartitioning.
As for Bodhi, I've been meaning to upgrade it anyway, and see if E is almost about to reach some maturity

I'll probably need some help with getting the partitions right this time, so I can't close this thread just yet - sorry to keep bothering!

I don't know, I've never compared their performance.


It's not like that kernel 3 series have been wrought with regressions but there's been a few so I actually wouldn't be surprised if a 3.2 kernel behaved differently in some aspects than a 3.4 one.


If you don't want to do benchmarking (looking at the possibilities for using 'sysctl vm.block_dump' output I found another interesting one: seekwatcher which uses blktrace to visualize disk I/O), if you don't want to try different kernel versions then, yes, repartitioning seems the only way even though distro performance doesn't seem to point that way...

AFAIK, yes, (at least if you use 'MiB alignment') but I dont know what version (or newer) you need. Sorry I'm not more use, I set up 'advanced format' drives with fdisk.

I cant, though its possible that the 'other OS' actually has aligned partitions. I think you may have another problem apart from alignment. The alignment problem wont be helping things though.

Well, I finally did come to a conclusion.
The RAM is just way to small (2GB), not to slow. I realized a relation to browsing with a lot of tabs open, maybe also in more than one browser.
Other aspects aside that may have contributed to slowdown of the system (like e.g. misaligend partitions), this is what triggered the intolerable sluggishness. Looking at RAM usage when having many browser tabs open solved the mistery.
I started looking for larger RAM sticks, but as always, as soon as the technology (DDR1) is outdated, the price rises to a forbidding level, making you consider a new system altogether, which is what I went for eventually (hence my signature no longer matching this thread).
The reason why I hardly ran into this issue on Bodhi Linux OS was surely its minuscule memory footprint, allowing me to go much further with the browser tabs. Of course, I could have gone on with the same hw, always watching the RAM usage and keeping the number of tabs down to a sane number, which has the sensible side effect that you become less prone to multitasking more than you can actually handle...
So long, very old PC!
:-)