Newly installed ubuntu feels slow

Question

About two years ago I first tried Ubuntu (11.04) on my sony vaio fw11e and I remember that I was impressed by how smoothly everything just worked out of the box. For different reasons i reverted back to windows 7 however.

Today I tried installning ubuntu 12.04 32-bit on the same computer and now everything seems a bit "off" (slow resonse time on mouse clicks etc). First of all the CPU-fan is at maximum load, blowing out burning hot air all the time. Secondly the suggested proprietary graphics drivers from ATI wont install correctly, and I get a strong feeling that the hardware overall is not recognized correctly in the OS.

1. Is there any reason that the older Ubuntu 11.04 would be working better with my laptop (especially the ATI drivers) or could there be another reason for the un-smoothness that I am experiencing.

2. Should I try installning older versions of Ubuntu?

3. Is there a way to see if the motherboard chipset drivers are correct?

Computer specs: Intel PM45 Intel Core 2 Duo 2,2 GHz 3 GB RAM ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3470

Answer 1

install "Ubuntu Tweak", then launch janitor and clean everything you can. See if that helps. Also, try installing "gnome desktop environment" because it's quite lite on system resources

Answer 2

If you have the bandwidth and a couple of USB sticks to spare, I suggest you try out Xubuntu which uses the Xfce environment and Lubuntu which uses the LXDE environment (and the Openbox window manager) as Live USBs and see how well either plays with your hardware. Using an official Ubuntu derivative which is less demanding on resources may be preferable to falling back to an older version.

There are other possibilities such as just installing a lighter desktop on your existing set-up. You will then be able to try out different environments at the time of logging in.

To get the Xubuntu desktop, you'd use sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop
To get the Lubuntu desktop, you'd use sudo apt-get install lubuntu-desktop

You could also be more "minimal" and go for sudo apt-get install xfce4 which will give you just the Xfce 4.10 experience or sudo apt-get install lxde to get the LXDE/Openbox experience.

Although having multiple desktops in the same installation is usually not a problem, my preference is to stick with a pure installation of any distro.

Answer 3

It might be a kernel issue that is causing the problem. Follow the instructions at http://www.webupd8.org/2011/06/linux-kernel-power-issue-fix.html