[ubuntu-uk] Poor performance with Ubuntu on my laptop

[Gareth France]

I was thrilled when I recently got a brand new laptop for the 2nd time 
in my life. It's a budget model but I figured with 4Gb DDR3 and a 500Gb 
HDD it was a massive improvement over my ageing dell which had only a 
60Gb drive. The new machine was a catalogue purchase where they listed 
it as simply having a Pentium processor. I joked at the time that this 
either means they were too lazy to type i3 or that it comes with a 
processor from 1995! It is a Packard Bell EasyNote TK85.

Little did I know how right I was! The performance is a joke! Playing 
music in Banshee while browsing web pages leads to light skipping. Using 
certain sites firefox greys out and freezes every 30 seconds or so! It's 
just not coping.

I never ran Windows on it, wiping the drive before it completed the 
first boot was extremely satisfying, however having realised a friend's 
Acer 5733z is literally identical, all bar cosmetic changes to the 
trackpad, power button etc, it got me thinking. They haven't complained 
about anything on their machine. Both have the Pentium P6200 processor.

I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 32 bit on there at the moment. I was wondering 
if someone could suggest a distro which is less podgy to install and see 
if that works any better.

Thanks
Gareth