How much memory do you have in your laptop?
Your CPU has only 2 cores so that could be the bottleneck.
All the default AppVMs are present.
There is a separate tab for templates and service qubes at the top of Qubes OS menu:
APPS | TEMPLATES | SERVICE
You can create new qubes freely as well.
what could be the reason there are no applications in the cubes?
Maybe because of your slow CPU the applications in qubes weren’t refreshed properly and it failed because of timeout or something.
You can try to refresh the applications manually.
Open the qubes Settings → Applications tab and press on the “Refresh applications” button.
On my way now, learning curve is steep. One step at a time.
What might help to speed up the overall performance of the laptop? Adding more RAM (or is the i5 the limiting factor)?
How much RAM do you have in your laptop?
Currently the Lenovo has 8 MB RAM, would putting 32 MB in the machine make a significant difference?
If the machine is slow even when just a few qubes are running then adding more RAM won’t help.
Dom0 takes 4 GB of your RAM and for all other VMs you have only 4 GB available. if you’ll use too many qubes and they won’t have enough RAM for them then your system will use swap on disk and this could cause the slowness.