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

[Gareth France]

On 04/10/12 16:18, Colin Law wrote:
> 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
>
I'm using unity 3d but in some ways the machine excels, it ships with an 
HDMI port and as I said when using Windows on the Acer there are no 
issues. I was thinking there must be a lot to be saved by using a non 
Ubuntu distro or seriously tweaking Ubuntu. For instance do I really 
need the bluetooth features on a laptop without bluetooth? As for Unity 
2D, I'm loathed to do that is it's a stop-gap, what will I do in future 
versions where 2D is being removed?