[ubuntu-in] question about gradual slow down in Ubuntu system

[ramnarayan.k at gmail.com]

Hi

recently ran a live version of simplymepis to see what it looked like

it booted quickly and ran through its load up of KDE very fast , working
 on it was quite good to - ran multiple operations - word processor,
spreadsheet, internet a music player etc.

Sometimes the system would slow down , i guess waiting for the cd to
catch up with the commands.

this is on my laptop which is running Ubuntu 8.10.

I am finding that ubuntu is slow to boot up and when i open multiple
functions the CPU usage goes up like crazy - on of the dual cores
reaches 100 % and the average is very high - like 40 - 50 % (when i noticed)

generally things seem slow.

RAM is about 1.5 GB and Swap  is 2.8 GB
Processor Dual Core t2400 at 1.83 MHz.
hard Disk is pretty full at about 90 + %
***

My root is about 75% used (5.3 GB used).

I won't say i have extraordinary amounts of software installed.

My desktop use bars have a fair bit of icons on them, my desktop is
medium clean ( i know in windows things slow down when the desktop is
stuffed but thought that is not a problem in Linux)

***
When i use openoffice (version 3) sometimes when some specific functions
are happening the system almost freezes - like when pasting images into
writer, or pasting a section of a web page - with links etc, or when i
am manually scrolling and selecting cells in calc spreadsheet.

**
Am wondering if anyone else has seen / felt such slowdowns and what
could be the causes.

Also what can be done to improve speeds.

ram