I did use lubuntu for about a year, and liked it. It did take a little more work to setup the way I liked it, but I got it there. The thing is it began having stability issues. Random lockups and firefox was crashing so often that I began using barebone browsers to avoid them. After thoroughly checking motherboard capacitors (none bad) - Thats what led me to MATE. MATE is stable with nvidia based graphics, and has yet to lockup or freeze even once. Firefox is better behaved too.
I did have a 40gb drive in this box not being used (left over from a 0 striped array) - so I burned a disk per your instructions using brasero (I usually use k3b). Switched the ide cable, and power supply to the new drive. Then did a fresh install to the drive. Did the welcome updates, and fixes. Then the software updater. As I installed Skype I got an error…the same error as before, but this time during install…it was the “unexpected crash” error - which had the same journal error entry saying the cpu was not supported. However, even with the error, it finished installing. The result is the same. Skype will not launch, and after a few minutes the error message appears. Just thought I would let you know.