11.10 Is Really Killing My Wife's Machine

[demonboy]

As soon as my wife logs in to Ubuntu One and starts syncing, her machine almost grinds to a halt. She has an old Acer 4315. Does anyone have any suggestions or should this be something she only logs in to when going to bed? Is it possible to schedule Ubuntu One and can you see its progress aside from the annoying messages that flash up every five minutes?

Thanks!

[blackbird34]

I could have sworn you wrote something completely different five minutes ago...

Scheduling? What about cron? Not the most beautiful or easy, but it seems well respected: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CronHowto
I don't use cron much, or ubuntu one at all, but why not find out?

[Gatemaze]

It is good that you have provided the specs of your wife's pc. Ubuntu main seems to be following a direction that requires new hardware... although I am a bit surprised that unity 2d is also slow... I would suggest that you try a lighter version. If you want to stay in the ubuntu verse the I would strongly suggest trying xfce. Another alternative is lxde.

You don't need to reinstall anything, just type:

sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop

for xfce and select on the login manager

or

sudo apt-get install lubuntu-desktop

for lxde

[demonboy]

Hi - my apologies but I changed the title and content of my post as you were replying. I wasn't aware that my wife had started syncing with Ubuntu One (she loves the idea of cloud back-up) but it seems as if that is the main problem. We have now disabled it and her laptop is performing much better, so I changed the content of my post to that of the Ubuntu One issue. One plus - at least Ubuntu One works with 11.10! In 11.04 it used to grind MY machine to a halt, let alone my wife's!

I've switched her over to Gnome for the moment to see if she likes that as she's still not convinced of Unity. Sadly I can't help her with tweaks as I don't know it. Unless you can suggest a good website with some basic tweaks it is something we will have to spend some time researching. Time which neither of us have, of course!