My two problems with KDE is 1) It's too flashy and 2) Every program you install for it has K at the beginning of it's name. But I just saw a video of KDE 4.1 and I am kind of intrigued.
So I was wondering two things:
Will KDE battery on my laptop faster than say, GNOME or XFCE?
Is there a way I can just use gnomes apps and download the Desktop manager for KDE, without all the K-software?

My KDE 3.5 is not flashy at all - it's as ugly as sin This is actually by choice as I try to disable any distractions.

Starting with KDE 4 tradition to name every program Ksomething has been dropped (although, come on, this is not a good reason not to use great software ). New additions to KDE desktop include programs named Dragon Player (minimalistic video player), Dolphin (file manager), Okular (document viewer), Gwenview (picture viewer) and others.

You can certainly use Gnome or XFCE apps while running KDE (as well as the other way round) - all you need is appropriate libraries installed. Although may I suggest trying KDE native apps - who knows, you might actually like them

With regards to battery use probably the best way to find out is to run it. KDE setups aren't that much 'heavier' than Gnome (if at all) - mostly it depends on you and your distro's defaults, anyway.

How is kde 3.5 more flashy then gnome?, and why do you not use software just because of its name?

You do know of course that you can turn down (or off) all the desktop effects to make KDE less taxing on your laptop's resources.

Yeah, what's the kmatter with the KDE kprogram knames ?