Problems with Ubuntu Gnome 14.04

[Nick Wood]

Hi all,

I installed the vanilla Ubuntu 14.04 on an old laptop and was not happy with
the performance of the Unity desktop (machine only has 1GB of RAM which I
gather is too little to get good performance from Unity).

Next I tried a fresh install of Ubuntu Gnome, which I gather is like the
vanilla Ubuntu but with Unity swapped for Gnome.  This version is supposed
to offer better performance from what I have read.

The install went fine, and I get speech at the logon screen.  But once
logged in, the only speech I get is the word "Window" when I press the super
key to open the dash, and I get no speech when navigating around the
desktop.  If I do Ctrl+Alt+T to open the terminal I get speech, but that's
about the only place where speech works.

Any ideas? Could this be a graphics driver issue?

Thanks,

Nick