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Ubuntu sluggish

Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2011 6:12 pm
by RickyTick
I thought it time to "broaden" my experience with operating systems and dabble with some Ubuntu.

I had an old Dell in the closet with a bad hard drive, and thought it would be a perfect candidate. I purchased a refurbished hard drive and installed 11.04 on it. As a long time Windows user, it took a little getting used to, but that's to be expected. I noticed right away that it was not as snappy as I thought it should be. After all, this system ran fine with Windows XP and only .5 GB of ram. So I purchased new ram that maxed out the pc at 1GB (2x.5gb). However, it was still rather slow. Yesterday I downloaded 11.10 with the hopes of performance improvements. I have to say that I'm really disappointed with it. The upgrade didn't help at all. There's a noticeable delay when clicking on any app. Every action seems slow to respond.

Is this normal for Ubuntu? Is my expectation too great? Is my old Dell just not up to the task? Any ideas or suggestions?

I really like Ubuntu and could easily use it regularly, but not like it is now.

System spec
Dell Dimension 4300
Pentium 4 @1.6ghz
1gb ram
60gb HD 7200rpm
GeForce 2 MMX

Thanks

Re: Ubuntu sluggish

Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2011 7:21 pm
by grantmeaname
My rig, with SSD, is similarly sluggish. I'm probably going back to 10.10, honestly.

Re: Ubuntu sluggish

Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2011 7:50 pm
by bthylafh
Did you try using Ubuntu 2D instead? On the login screen, click that gear icon next to where you enter your password. Much of Ubuntu's UI is 3D accelerated, unlike Windows XP, and that's going to be dog slow on such an old video card.

Really, given how old the system is, you'd be much better served by installing Xubuntu or if that's too sluggish, Lubuntu.

Re: Ubuntu sluggish

Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2011 8:20 pm
by RickyTick
I didn't know there was a 2D option. Maybe I'll give that a try. I really have nothing to loose no matter what I do.

Re: Ubuntu sluggish

Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2011 8:22 pm
by bthylafh
It'd save time with installing the other *buntus if you opened a terminal and typed

sudo apt-get install lubuntu-desktop xubuntu-desktop

(I'd tell you the GUI method, but that seems to change every few versions)

then log off and from that gear menu select which environment you want to try.

Re: Ubuntu sluggish

Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2011 8:40 pm
by Blazex
11.04 worked perfectly fine even when i was running unity for the first day or two when it released, but 11.10 unity just brought the system to a crawl, managed to spend forever navigating the slow that software center became, installed gnome-shell again and its as snappy as it was with 11.04 using gnome shell remix.
unity and software center are just horribly slow far as my laptop goes :/ not that i wanted unity anyways

Re: Ubuntu sluggish

Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2011 8:43 pm
by Blazex
for minimal interfaces with good performance, id say go lubuntu(lxde) or try enlightenment, i had yet to try that one out of all the variants of *buntu. xubuntu seemed about as bad as ubuntu for my a64 but lubuntu was flying fast compared to it.

Re: Ubuntu sluggish

Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2011 9:52 pm
by kc77
I would drop back to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS with that rig. You'll have a system that's far snappier. Also since it's an LTS version it's pretty much rock stable too.

Re: Ubuntu sluggish

Posted: Wed Oct 19, 2011 6:48 am
by RickyTick
Thanks for the suggestions. I'll look into a lighter versions. I'm really surprised that this system can't handle it. :-?