I have a Lenovo Thinkpad x140e (AMD A4-5000M 1.5GHz 2MB L2 Cache Quad-core, 4GB DDR3) that I am currently dual booting with Mint and Windows 8. Mint feels sluggish compared to Win8.
I am not doing much with it, I need to run the Spotify app, and a webpage for hosting game tournaments. I am using the HDMI out on the laptop to a 4x4 Matrix.
I am looking for suggestions for a lightweight as possible distro.
Try out the Linux Mint XFCE edition. The default desktop environment in Mint is Cinnamon, which is a Fork of GNOME and uses a lot of JavaScript code and thus has high resource consumption. XFCE is very fast and lightweight, I think you will have a better experience with it.
It looks like i am already running Xfce.
Then perhaps try out PeppermintOS