Ubuntu newbie/ computer novice with a question on performance. Downloaded Ubuntu 14.04 LTS from a purchased disk. The installation process went flawless. My problem is the OS is crawling (hovering the curser over an icon takes 10 seconds for the text to appear, clicking on an icon takes at least 30 seconds for the screen to appear). This computer is an older 32 bit Emachine running XP SP3. Specs: Intel Celeron 2.70 ghz. 1.2G memory (original 256m that I expanded by adding 1G). Graphics are Intel 845GX86/MMX/SSE2 80G hard drive that I partitioned (25G for Ubuntu, plus the swap partition).
I ran memory check and it came back fine (all 1.2G recognized). I defragged and ran disk check prior to the installation with no errors. I changed swappiness to 10 with no change to the performance. I ran the check for additional graphic drivers and received "no additional drivers found". I realize my old computer won't give optimum performance on the Unity desktop, but is this super-slow condition normal? Would I be better off with Xubuntu or an early Mint version OS? I'm aware of the command "sudo apt-get install gnome-session-fallback" to change the DE but have not gone that route yet. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance for any comments or help.