Lubuntu looks perfect for old hardware. It runs brilliantly on my old inspiron 1300 but there was no network applet at all so I was pretty frustrated getting it on wifi.
There is lots of help on the internet, but it took me a while to realise that the missing network applet was a bug and the fix was easy.
http://www.webupd8.org/2014/04/fix-lubuntu-1404-network-manager.html
I moved the old Ubuntu installation over to a new SSD. Performance was as I’d hoped, with the PC booting in 15 seconds, half the time of a normal HDD. It may not seem like much time, but the laptop is flying now. A second here, a second there and it FEELS like a new machine.
Rendering CyanogenMod 10 time is unchanged though – the disk has no effect on the processor of course. But I am now “rocking” CM10 on my tablet that I “cooked” myself. It is working better this time, I think I got the wrong version of google market or something last time.
For the record, I used clonezilla, installed on an old 512MB USB stick on a partition to partition copy (most of the old 500GB disk was Windows 7). I then used this excellent post to install grub 2 after floundering through some others that were similar but didn’t do the job.
Like many others I had problems making my files visible on Ubuntu 12.04. In the end I got all I needed from nexus7tablethelp.com but had to use the tip in the comments from Daniel to make it work better. This does not give me access to “sdcard” on the nexus 7 so I am still stuck downloading anything like backups.
I’m assuming that by Ubuntu 12.10 this functionality will be native, but at least I have some access now.