I have an old laptop I just use in the mornings for web browsing. Was running Mint for the last year (first computer I switched form Windows) and it worked well, but was quite slow (same as when it was running Windows). Browsing was fine if the browser was left open, but opening any app took quite awhile.

Anyway, I run Cachy on all my other computers and after having a Mint issue figured I'd just swap it. It's like a whole new laptop now, snappy and pretty instant for apps. Was quite surprised. Also the touch screen works, wasn't expecting that.

Agreed. Also these kind of tests are always weird, because its mostly default settings. While this makes sense in Windows, it only makes kind of sense in a Linux distribution, because as you said its actually more about stuff like the desktop environment. But at least, because it is default configuration, we know what it means and contains. I also don't care about the results for Windows, just compare the Linux vs Linux stuff, that's more interesting to me.