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

[Simon Greenwood]

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.
>
>
What might be possible is that there's some kind of clock management going
on that processor that works in Windows but not in Linux. I've had machines
like that in the past and especially with the i3 there are a number of
desktop and mobile variants and without looking, you may have a low end
laptop variant. Looking at /proc/cpuinfo or System Monitor will give you an
idea of what it thinks it is. Overclocking it might work but I'm sure you
can do better even for their price.

I do have to say that, as nice as some of their machines look, Packard Bell
is a budget line and as was said many years ago, the name evokes two
classic American names while having none of their quality.
-- 
Twitter: @sfgreenwood
"TBA are particularly glib"
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