Problems with ubuntu 11.04

[Colin Law]

On 9 August 2011 18:31, Andrew <andy.allen at virgin.net> wrote:
> On Tue, 2011-08-09 at 13:32 +0100, Colin Law wrote:
>
>> 11.04 is fine as far as I am concerned.   It will be superseded by
>> 11.10 in October (11 is the year and 10 is the month of release).
>> Ubuntu should certainly not be unstable and many find it noticeably
>> faster than running Windows on the same hardware.
>>
>> How much RAM have you got?
>> Exactly what do you mean by unstable?  Give an example of the problem
>> in as much detail as you can.
>> In what way does it appear slow?  What activity takes longer than you expect?
>> When it is going slow is the disk light continually flickering for
>> tens of seconds (ie disc thrashing)?
>>
>> Are you using the Unity interface (with the icons down the side) or
>> the Classic interface with the menus across the top?
>>
> Hi Colin,
> Thanks for the reply - my system (according to System Monitor) has 495.6
> MiB memory and the processor is Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 1700MHz,
> available disk space 29.0 GiB, so presumably should be OK.

You are a marginal on RAM, see
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/SystemRequirements.
The processor is fine though, so you might well benefit from some more
RAM if you can fit it.  It might dramatically speed up your system.

> When I say unstable, I mean that, with certain applications running, eg
> mail and web browser, sometimes everything disappears from the screen
> for a few seconds (except the coloured background) and then reappears -
> so the system doesn't crash. It's working OK at the moment because I've
> only got the mail client open - I just opened Firefox web browser and it
> happened again so maybe the problem is with Firefox?

I don't know whether RAM shortage might cause this sort of issue or not.

> The other problem I've got is with the HP Colour Laserjet 3500 printer
> installation - as I said I've installed hplip-3.11.7 and everything
> seems fine except that, when I print the test page from the HPLIP Status
> Service icon all features appear correct except the Color Wheel - the
> colours don't look right according to the lettering around the wheel.

Sorry, I can't help with that.  You might be better to start a
separate thread with a meaningful subject for that.  Some readers just
skim through the subjects looking for those that interest them.  Your
subject line is not very helpful.

Following on from what others have said, did you upgrade in one go or
in steps?  If you upgraded in one go (and I don't know how you could
do that) then you may be in trouble.

Colin