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I got a HP dv7-1133cl with some terrible Windows issues (black screen shortly after starting) and so I installed Ubuntu 16.04 as a learning experience as well as to have my own personal laptop. It runs pretty well, but I want it to be faster if I use it as my main home computer. I use Youtube, Kissanime, surf the web (usually these forums), and run LibreOffice for powerpoints and word documents in school. I will probably never even get to 75Gb of used storage. I think this laptop should be fast, considering my usage (am I wrong?).

I can't seem to pinpoint what is making my computer lag sometimes. I have only about 8 Gb of storage used on the 250Gb HD and I won't be putting anything important on it until I feel that I have a grasp on the system.

It takes about a minute for total load time. If I open Firefox, it takes 10-15 seconds. In YouTube and Kissanime (Kissanime is dreadfully slow), there is lag. But if I look at free -m, it seems like my computer isn't working all that hard. My CPU usage is low, at around 10-15% idle, and hardly ever spiking over 50%.

Here are some relevant specs:

x86_64 CPU op-mode(s):        32-bit,    64-bit 
Byte Order:            Little Endian 
CPU(s):                2    
On-line CPU(s) list:   0,1 
Thread(s) per core:    1 
Core(s) per    socket:    2 
Socket(s):             1 
NUMA node(s):          1 
Vendor    ID:             
AuthenticAMD CPU family:            17 
Model:            3 
Model name:            AMD Turion(tm) X2 Dual-Core Mobile RM-70   
Stepping:              1 
CPU MHz:               500.000 
CPU max MHz:         2000.0000 
CPU min MHz:         500.0000 
BogoMIPS:             3998.31 
Virtualization:    AMD-V 
L1d cache:         64K 
L1i cache:             64K
L2 cache:              512K 
NUMA node0 CPU(s):    0,1

This is what my memory useage looks like:

$ free -m
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           3695        1550         875          37        1269        1834
Swap:          3836           0        3836

Decreasing swappiness to 10 actually made cpu% go way up, so I switched it back to 60 (I didn't think this would work). I have 4 questions:

  1. Will upgrading to an SSD and putting applications on it solve the issue? (I have a 60Gb SSD on the way from Amazon, but I would like to optimize things as much as possible now).

  2. What other upgrades or programs will make this computer faster?

  3. I prefer Firefox, but should I try using Chrome? (I've heard there is a lack of flash support or something like that with Firefox for Ubuntu users).

  4. Should I be using a lightweight Distro like Lubuntu? (Will it make a difference?)

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  • What kind of wifi hardware and drivers do you have? Lag on web sites like YouTube is more likely due to slow transfer rate than anything internal to the computer (like RAM saturation or excessive swapping).
    – Zeiss Ikon
    Dec 18, 2017 at 19:09
  • "AMD Turion(tm) X2 Dual-Core Mobile RM-70" is from 2008, which means the machine is nearly 10 years old. Taking that into account should help to temper unreasonable expectations. As lags happen on video streaming sites, the bottleneck is probably the graphics card. You may want to recheck "my cpu usage" while watching something on youtube. So, upgrading to a newer graphics card may help, everything else would be a waste of time. Dec 18, 2017 at 19:14
  • Graphics card: ATI Radeon HD 3200 Graphics RS780M Are you saying that it's impossible for this computer to load the desktop in say, 20 seconds, even with basically nothing stored on the hdd and everything on an SSD?
    – Flex
    Dec 19, 2017 at 8:52
  • @Zeiss, I have the rtl8101/2/6e, what is the best way to make sure these drivers are updated? I tried installing ndiswrapper, but I don't think it changed anything
    – Flex
    Dec 19, 2017 at 19:37
  • I'm not familiar with that Wifi setup, but having that information will help others.
    – Zeiss Ikon
    Dec 19, 2017 at 20:04

1 Answer 1

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So after a little, digging around, it seems that I updated the drivers not once, but twice in a row. NDISwrapper did the job (allows linux users to update windows-native drivers for their wifi hardware). My streaming on YouTube, KissAnime, and even my girlfriend's Netflix account is flawless (and faster than her younger Lenovo with 16gb ram). Can't wait to put the SSD in later today. Kudos to Zeiss, who got me on the right track.

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