I suspect it was a freak occurence, but I actually had incredible luck running Haiku on an old laptop back in the day. It was incredibly fast, and just about all the amenities you'd expect worked with no or minimal intervention.
Me too. The laptop was so old that I couldn't play a 360p mpg video without pauses on Windows 2K or XFCE, but it ran smoothly with BeOS5 (the Intel-based abandonware version)
I recently tried the latest version (Beta 5?) on a 2005-ish PC with an even older HDD and it ran surprisingly fast off that. The only thing where it was somewhat slow was web browsing.
