Simon Royal wrote:
Ultimately my question is, would Ubuntu run better than Xubuntu? I am trying to squeeze every ounce of power out of this beast.
I think you will find regardless of what the minimum requirements say, The Default Gnome desktop environment on Ubuntu would be very slow with 160MB of ram. Xfce (unless something has changed) was always considered a lighter environment in this respect. Other than that and the default packages installed there should be more or less no difference between Xubuntu and Ubuntu, in fact you can by installing the right packages make one like the other.