I've run the OS from a USB stick on a laptop I have and it was very sluggish.
The machine has a Core2Duo processor and 1GB of RAM. I've read in other posts here that the processor is up to the job, but that additional RAM would be very beneficial.
Is the fact that I was running the OS from the USB stick going too significantly slow things down? Will it be quicker when properly installed on the internal hard disk?
Is it realistic to expect a machine of this spec to deliver a smooth user experience with this OS? I could ramp up the RAM to 4GB if that's going to help, or should I stick with Lubuntu, which does work well on this machine, and look to run ElementaryOS on a better specified machine?