Thoughts from a friend newbie Ubuntu user

[Alain Muls]

Hi All,

I installed Ubuntu Karmic Koala last January on my friends computer
which had only used Windows XP/Vista up to then. He is far from being
a computer savvy, more a noob and only uses his PC for browsing,
e-mail and some invoices. The reason I was allowed to install Karmic
was that his Vista was slowing down, needing eg up to 3 minutes to get
to the desktop and sometimes an additional 2 to 3 minutes for having
the newtork (wired) up and running.

I challenged him that Ubuntu would be much faster and that he would
not have a problem making the switch. I also promised I would come and
fix the system if needed.

He was very pleased with Karmic's desktop and performance.

Last June I upgraded to Lucid since I want him to stay with a LTS
version of Ubuntu and not upgrade to a new distro every 6 months (he
is after all a noob). Though I made a mistake. I myself use the 64bit
version of Lucid and so I used this live CD to install his system. I
did not have enough time to test the system at that moment. He started
complaining that the new version was much slower than Karmic. I
wondered why. Some weeks ago I found out by installing a new system
for myself that not all 64bits drivers for the display work well. So
today I checked his system and indeed he did not have an accelerated
display driver. I then installed the 32 bit version of Lucid and he
immediately saw an improvement of speed after I enabled the nvidia
proprietary driver.

He still has a complaint because when logging in, the sound is played
but before the gnome desktops comes alive, it still takes about 15
seconds after the login sound. I said that it was due to the fact that
the system needed to connect to 4 samba shares on a NAS drive. But now
at my computer, I think that I am wrong. The mounting is done by
entries in fstab, so they should be active whenever the PC boots. So
this delay should not be there?

Your advice please,
bye/Alain