I suspect it was a freak occurence, but I actually had incredible luck running Haiku on an old laptop back in the day. It was incredibly fast, and just about all the amenities you'd expect worked with no or minimal intervention.
In the last year sometime I ran the Haiku live image off USB on my only laptop (2011 X201t), it worked fairly well.
Even running from an HDD?
In the last year sometime I ran the Haiku live image off USB on my only laptop (2011 X201t), it worked fairly well.