I don't know what you mean with "You're running extremely slow hardware", my minimum difficulty set on 64.
My laptop's graphics card gets ~110Mh/s, so ~80Mh/s really is quite slow.
The lower your hashrate, the lower the minimum difficulty you should use.
You should be using a min difficulty of 1.
The higher the minimum difficulty, the more network traffic will be generated, but the more steady your income will be.
This is incorrect. Higher minimum difficulty = less network traffic, but more variance.