I normally choose Ubuntu over Windows because speed and stability is something that's important to me.
However, recently Ubuntu has been slower than Windows for me. I use two systems -- one netbook (for writing), and one Desktop (for production) -- that I've been using since Karmic Koala, and never formatted ever since; for ever release, I simply upgraded the OS and now I'm on Precise Pangolin. A lot of reviews say that Precise boosts performance of the system, but for me it's gotten slower than ever -- both the interface performance AND The startup.
I also did a bit of cleanup, removing unwanted software and clearing the start-up menu, but that doesn't seem to help at all. On the netbook, I chose Unity2D, but even that has been buggy and slow for me. Along with slowness, I have also been experiencing other problems, though that is probably wise to keep for another question (the problems include repository errors, wacom pressure breakage, etc.)
Any way I could speed the system up without the need to format it?
Desktop: AMD Athlon x2, 3GB RAM DDR2, 9600gt GeForce Netbook: HP Mini, Intel Atom, 1GB RAM.
EDIT:
chu@chu-laptop:~$ top -Sbn1 | head -n20
top - 11:57:06 up 51 min, 1 user, load average: 3.03, 2.00, 2.71
Tasks: 173 total, 1 running, 172 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 44.4%us, 13.5%sy, 5.7%ni, 26.4%id, 9.8%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.2%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 988880k total, 914836k used, 74044k free, 37056k buffers
Swap: 1951860k total, 160424k used, 1791436k free, 340268k cached
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
28 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 3 0.0 0:15.08 kswapd0
20577 chu 20 0 2832 1148 864 R 3 0.1 0:00.06 top
4273 chu 20 0 862m 138m 23m S 2 14.3 18:13.77 firefox
5903 chu 20 0 214m 26m 11m S 2 2.7 6:41.92 plugin-containe
20321 chu 20 0 227m 16m 11m S 2 1.7 0:02.53 gnome-terminal
1 root 20 0 3644 1280 612 S 0 0.1 6:15.79 init
2 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 kthreadd
3 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:10.98 ksoftirqd/0
6 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 migration/0
8 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 migration/1
10 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:13.35 ksoftirqd/1
13 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 cpuset
14 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 khelper
chu@chu-laptop:~$ dstat 60 5
You did not select any stats, using -cdngy by default.
----total-cpu-usage---- -dsk/total- -net/total- ---paging-- ---system--
usr sys idl wai hiq siq| read writ| recv send| in out | int csw
47 13 29 10 0 0|1072k 238k| 0 0 | 18k 44k|1175 2299
16 6 64 14 0 0|1224k 89k| 440B 471B|6622B 2048B| 890 1801
37 10 50 3 0 0| 199k 65k| 15k 2660B| 10k 0 |1175 2134
35 9 47 9 0 0|1207k 97k| 592B 302B| 28k 95k|1255 2105
26 10 14 49 0 0|1985k 645k|1049B 575B| 54k 635k|1295 2133 missed 8
49 11 36 4 0 0| 367k 37k| 24k 1910B| 58k 0 |1129 1969
top -Sbn1 | head -n20
Please add the output to your question.sudo apt-get install dstat
to install a small monitoring utility.dstat 60 5
wait five minutes for the command to complete and also add the output to your question.