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

[Colin Law]

On 4 October 2012 15:54, Gareth France <gareth.france at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

It might be worth selecting unity-2d at logon time (click on the gear
next to the user name in the logon screen and select unity-2d) to see
if that helps.  In fact it probably will not as you are probably
already using unity-2d as the graphics h/w likely does not support 3d
anyway.  Worth a go though.

Otherwise, as others have suggested, try Lubuntu.

Colin