I have several of these HP ultra form factor machines after seeing them at work, they easily fit in a laptop case.  But both of them were dual cores, and between that and 15M internet I couldn't tell which was making the slowness.  I teach online classes and was losing many minutes a day waiting for stuff to come up.  So hooked up this i5 and now it's amazing.  Web pages are almost instantaneous. I avoided Windows photo viewer because it would take so long to come up, now it's right there.  I no longer use the Sleep function, it comes up in about 8 seconds.  I can't find anything comparable in speed and portability for this price.  If you're not a heavy gamer I can't see you being disappointed with this.