Why is Ubuntu 12.10 freezing and windows becoming greyed out?

Question

I've been using Ubuntu 12.04 since it was released last April. (I upgraded to 12.10 in October.)

Suddenly it began running very very poorly, acting as if I was using too much RAM or saturating my CPU. The system monitor and top did not seem to confirm this; I was only using about 30% of my RAM and barely any CPU.

Windows began greying out randomly and frequently and the system completely froze a few times. I figured this was some junk I'd been tinkering with over the year, so I backed up my data and formatted, then re-installed. After booting back up, I saw that the problems persisted.

System info:

• White box pc
• Intel Core2 Duo e8400
• 4GB DDR2 800Mhz
• Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS
• Ubuntu 12.10 64bit

Let me know if you need any further information. Any and all help is appreciated.

Answer 1

Have you tried installing Zram in terminal? Also have you tried installing Preload from the Ubuntu Software centre. I used Preload and that sped up my pc quite well. Well that's all the suggestions I have. Also type in google search "4 things to speed up Ubuntu" Try looking at the video from Nixie Pixel, she does vlogs every week and had a video on how to speed up Ubuntu. Hope this helps good luck! :)

One last thing you might have a bad sector or something on your hard drive, how old is the computer?

Answer 2

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:shnatsel/zram
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install zramswap-enabler

And:

sudo apt-get install preload -y 

Thanks Mike.