Unusually high CPU% and bad performance on both Ubuntu and Xubuntu

Question

I recently decided to switch to Ubuntu from Windows 7, and I've been having some problems regarding CPU usage. Any program I have running uses 40-50% of my CPU, which is way too much obviously. I'm running TeamSpeak 3, Terminal, and Firefox as we speak, and TS3's CPU% is around 45% steady, something called "Xorg" is always between 20% and 50%, changing a lot, and Firefox is switching between as little as 2% up to as high as 40%. Sometimes a process even goes up to 150% CPU. I'm using Xubuntu 12.10 now, but I've had the same problem when I used Ubuntu 12.10. I can't watch video properly, it's always lagging, and it's taking a long time to switch tabs in Firefox. I've been searching for the source of this problem for a long time but I couldn't find it, that's why I'm asking my question here.

My laptop specs are:

ASUS A52J
Intel i3 processor
4Gb RAM
AMD ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4500/5100 Series

Answer 1

First off, your processor is nothing more than a triple core processor rebranded with some hardware virtualization done. This virtualization cuts down the processing power read by the OS. so Linux will read that a process is using more of the CPU than it really is.

Second, Xorg is kind of like a graphics adapter; without it you would not have the Graphical User Interface (GUI) like Unity or KDE. The higher the graphics requirements of a program, the more processing Xorg will need. Xorg will also work as a basic graphic card driver. You may need to reinstall Ubuntu using 12.04 rather than 12.10, because 12.10 may not have any compatible third party graphics card drivers (that's why you will need to cut down the work load of Xorg to fix laggy video issue). 12.10 is fairly new. Companies like ATI and Nvidia do not update the drivers for every version of Linux or Ubuntu that comes out.

As far as Firefox goes, I really can't help you. I use Chromium which is like Google Chrome, only the Developer's version.