I had an Aspire One D270 laptop with a 32-bit Intel Atom CPU and 1 gigabyte of RAM, so I installed Debian with Xfce on it, but even then it's running way too slow.
Is there anything I can do to make the laptop faster and more responsive given its limited memory?
Compile your own kernel for those atom processors and they work much better.
It’s not hard, there’s a text interface for it where you just pick what to do from a list.