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So I just installed Ubuntu on a Dell D620 That previously had Windows 7 on it.

The thing I seem to be running into is that when I try to switch tabs on a browser or to a different application I get a serious amount of lag. Lag as in sometimes the tab in a browser will freeze before switching, it may be greyed out before it comes back and switches to new tab/application or the new tab is just white before the data/text shows up, and this takes a few seconds or minutes to do so.

Hardware: (listed what I know, not sure how to check other things) - 100Gb hard drive Which is brand new - 1.66Ghz Intel dual Core T5500 - 2 Gb Ram

I use Chrome for internet. I don't think I have that many heavy applications installed, other than eclipse for programming.

Things I've tried so far:

  • decreasing the swappiness to 15%. No noticeable change.
  • went to a lighter desktop (Xfce). Slight difference in change.

I'm looking for any general suggestions. One thought after reading up is should I uninstall Unity or do I not have to worry about it if I log in with a lighter desktop. 

   me@myUbuntu:~$ free -m
  total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
  Mem:          1992       1756        236        109          7        267
  -/+ buffers/cache:       1480        511
  Swap:         2036         48       1988

  me@myUbuntu:~$ df -h
  Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
  /dev/sda1       108G  7.5G   95G   8% /
  none            4.0K     0  4.0K   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
  udev            986M  4.0K  986M   1% /dev
  tmpfs           200M  1.2M  199M   1% /run
  none            5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
  none            997M   15M  982M   2% /run/shm
  none            100M   20K  100M   1% /run/user
  me@myUbuntu:~$

Not completely sure what I am looking at under free -m but it appears the memory fills up pretty quickly. This is only with a few chrome windows open.

Rob McNeil
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2 Answers2

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So, the laptop is a Dell from about 2006 or thereabout, still an able machine, but hardly in its prime. In other words, while still usable, I wouldn't expect too much out of it, as time goes on.

The outputs above don't show anything out of the ordinary, there is a bit of swapping, which indicates that RAM may be the reason for slowdowns. Google Chrome and Eclipse are known to be relatively RAM heavy programs, so you may want to look at their respective RAM usage closely.

Switching to another DE, while using the same "I don't think I have that many heavy applications installed" probably not going to help. If RAM is the bottleneck, consider upgrading if possible.

There you have it, ...some pretty general suggestions.

mikewhatever
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This is benchmark of your CPU: http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/37914

and this is CPU benchmark of one and half year old smartphone: http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/1860896

I really hope you will understand.

XperianX
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