Or even worse, they might not have a huge software running, but the small updaters, toolbars, anti-malware monitors, hardware 'managers' and all that crap can add up pretty quickly.

It's not rare for me to see applications running faster on my meager single-core 1.6GHz laptop than on considerably faster machines, only because they don't have to compete as much.

I wonder if anyone out there does actually test in a browser with 19 toolbars, virus scanners which intercept every read() call, and bonzibuddy?

and 4 viruses concurrently trying to connect to their respective master nodes?

Like a virus scanner. Or a virus.