Linux Mint Debian on a Thinkpad T43

Installed it on my lovely T43.
The installation was pretty smooth, took about an hour to finish, being Debian, there is no option to encrypt your $HOME.
The whole base install uses about 4.8 GB of HDD, which really seems like a lot to me.
Suspend and hibernate seems to be working A Ok.
The system doesn't feel much snappier than the plain vanilla Linux Mint 13 version.