Battle of the lightweight Linuxes: LXLE versus Crunchbang

I have some editing work looming and I need a small portable machine to do it on. My netbook is a bit too small so I've resurrected my 2004 Thinkpad X31.

I've wiped Lubuntu (as the latest versions need PAE support & although I managed to hack it on there, loads of stuff stopped working), and replaced with with LXLE, the "life extension" for Lubuntu 12.04 (which isn't an LTS release).

And I've wiped Linux Mint Debian Edition and replaced it with the latest Crunchbang.

Then wasted the rest of my evening tweaking Crunchbang, so that GPU acceleration works, compositing is turned off, my Thinkpad middle-mouse button works, turned CapsLock into Super and Right-Alt into Compose, added Zram and tweaked it for a single swap file, dropped the colour depth to 16-bit and more. But I think everything's working now. I've replaced Iceweasel with Firefox & Chrome, Abiword/Gnumeric with LibreOffice 4.1 from wheezy-testing, added Pidgin and some odds and sods.

The question is, which will be more use and more pleasant on a 9YO notebook with just a gig of RAM?

Any guesses? :¬)