10.1 Desktop Spec

Just installed 10.1 with KDE on my desktop PC, it's a 2.8GHz P4 with 1GB RAM. Without any applications running the load average is 2 and it seems quite sluggish (more so than 10.0). I appreciate that a 2.8GHz processor is a little oldskool these days so I was wondering what hardware this OS is aimed/optimised for? Seems that the notion that you only need a powerful desktop PC to run Windows is definitely a thing of the past. Matthew