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I have an old DELL laptop with 2GB of RAM and Ubuntu 14.04 (64-bit) as its OS. Many times I am out of RAM and thus every thing goes very slow! I think there is many background programs (services or daemons) which are not used by me at all. Is there any way to find those programs and force them not to start automatically on system reboot?

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While I respect you intend to only ask one question, how to not load software you don't need, I perceive you to be asking two questions, the other, or primary one, how to make a computer run better with only 2gb of RAM. I would like very much to answer that question as I suspect I can help.

As you probably know, by default all Ubuntu installations configure some amount of "swap space" on the hard drive, and for most people, that amount is adequate. For most people 2gb of RAM is adequate as well. I suspect that your main problem isn't simply that you are running out of RAM, but that you are also running out of swap space. There are two ways to solve that and one is much easier to accomplish, though the other is probably easier on your RAM situation.

Either manually expand your swap partition. or Install this Dynamic Swap Space Manager.

The latter has been my preferred solution for most people, mainly because it permits you to use as much of your drive for swap space as your drive allows, but it doesn't permanently tie up any of your drive as a dedicated swap partition.

There is one more thing you might do, but only if it applies to you: IF you are running the 64 bit version of Ubuntu 14.04, please downgrade to the 32bit version. It is my impression that the 64 bit version uses or wastes memory at about a 2:1 ratio as compared to the 32 bit version.

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  • He could also monitor the swap usage with tools like indikator-multiload or the free-command. If the swap space is not full, it might be necessary to tweak the swappines value. It also shows whether there is any swap activated at all (Ubuntu sometimes loses the link to the swap partition after partitioning tasks) and how big it is. As far as I know, about 1-2x the size of the RAM is recommended as swap. Although, I usually run fine with 2GB RAM and about 900MB swap.
    – Byte Commander
    Feb 18, 2015 at 0:58
  • My OS uses a swap partition with 8GB size! Feb 18, 2015 at 1:10
  • But is it working? I'm asking because I discovered a couple of years ago that my swap partition, though present, wasn't active. I discovered a terminal command to determine of it was active, although since I discovered a graphical way. If you open any program dealing with partitions, and if the swap partition appears to be "mounted" then it is in use. If it does not appear to be mounted, then it is not being used, and you might as well have no swap partition at all. The commands are sudo swapon and sudo swapoff to turn swap on and off. To see how much you have left, type "free -m".
    – gyropyge
    Feb 18, 2015 at 1:47

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