Evening, gang.
As the primary Puppy on the old Dell Latitude I bought year before last, I run Xenialpup64. It's the best blend between being able to run modern browsers, etc, and being sufficiently lightweight to not bog the Core2Duo down too much. It really does run nicely on here.
I have a huge library of movies, which I now have sitting on a 512 GB SanDisk Ultra 'Fit' USB 3.2 Gen1 flashdrive which is permanently plugged-in to one of the 4 onboard USB 2.0 ports. I've been trying to find the best media player for this old girl.....which won't make the CPU or the Nvidia mobile GPU run too hot.
Anthing mPlayer-based seems to have the oddity of refusing to correctly re-size on the Lat. Kodi is just too 'heavy', and VLC, though it runs well, makes the GPU run way too hot for my liking. I'd more or less given up on finding anything that will play nice with this hardware.......and then I suddenly had a brainwave. I'd forgotten all about Xine, and its sibling app GXine (which has a nicer GUI than Xine itself).
I used to use this on many of my older 32-bit Pups on the ancient Compaq desktop some years back. It's beautifully optimised for low-powered hardware, and it runs very sweetly here on the Lat; CPU temps hover around 45C, the Nvidia Quadro mobile GPU doesn't get much above 58-60C, and - best of all! - I can watch movies in full-screen with no tearing, flickering OR buffering.
It does take a bit of setting-up - the options in Preferences are quite extensive, and can be a bit confusing to some - and it's nothing special to look at, though the interface is neat, tidy and nicely functional. We've most of us gradually become accustomed to steadily more powerful hardware, and the old days of Puppians really NEEDING to stick with minimalist apps are receding into the past.....meaning that 'mainstream' apps are now much easier to run. However, I reckon I've found the ideal media player for this particular setup. 
For anyone else running Core2Duo-era hardware, I can thoroughly recommend it. Light as a feather - libxine2 takes care of EVERYTHING - it's available in the parent repos of most Puppies.
Mike. 
