Low Spec computer

[Vunutus]

My computer specs are almost exactly the same and I run Jaunty with full visual/compiz effects with plenty of power left over for whatever I want to do. It should not be slow.

[supersonicdarky]

Ditch all the DE and get a superior WM like openbox or fluxbox.

Lighter on the resources, clean design, and increaces productivity (when configured properly).

[scorp123]

I am running ubuntu 9.04 ext4 on an Emachines with an athlon 3200 processor, 1 gig ram, 160 hard drive, and nvidia 256mb video card. The computer is 6 years old.

This is not a "low spec" computer

I have Ubuntu 9.04 running on a system that originally was equipped with a "Windows CE" installation (Yes! "Windows CE" !!). It used to be a "thin client". Once I took this thing apart I noticed it has standard IDE connectors. So I replaced the 32 MB IDE-Flash disk where Windows CE was installed with a 8 GB IDE-Flash disk from Transcend and now I am running Ubuntu 9.04 and Torrentflux on this thing. VIA C7 CPU, 1 GHz, 256 MB RAM, 32 MB shared video memory, 8 GB Flash-Disk .... And Ubuntu 9.04 works tip top here. Power consumption: 11 Watts. So this thing consumes less power than a light bulb.

[Coreigh]

This is not a low spec computer. I'd say the problem is that it is an emachine or you have a configuration error (or both.)

I am having performance problems with Jaunty but I had Hardy (8.04) running very well on an OLD 1ghz Dell with 512MG ram. Hardy is a long term support release and is still available.

[XubuRoxMySox]

I have learned that Ubuntu sometimes uses more RAM in certain applications on purpose rather than swap, to speed things up! It doesn't mean that it has "maxed out" your machine. It would use less RAM if less was available and rely more on swap.

For truly low-spec computers, I recommend the Ubuntu-based, minimal Crunchbang, and if you want a nice pretty newbie-friendly desktop, LXDE is extremely lightweight and simplistic. The two play nice together as long as you let PCMan (LXDE's built-in file manager) manage the desktop.

-Robin

[XubuRoxMySox]

This is not a low spec computer. I'd say the problem is that it is an emachine or you have a configuration error (or both.)

I'm told that e-machines are famous for their power supply problems! Sometimes just replacing their power supply with a better one solves alot of problems.

-Robin

[HeirPixel]

I'm told that e-machines are famous for their power supply problems! Sometimes just replacing their power supply with a better one solves alot of problems.

I'll second that possibility, especially with the video card (which I'm guessing didn't come with the original system). Emachines pretty much get by with the cheapest hardware possible, so the base power supply probably isn't built to run anything extra. That extra video card could be trying to pull juice that just isn't there!