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:
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).
What other upgrades or programs will make this computer faster?
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).
Should I be using a lightweight Distro like Lubuntu? (Will it make a difference?)