how can I make this PC faster?

**scottuss** · August 4th, 2008

Originally Posted by Naralas

Okay, I can get XP running reasonably well on a computer with an old AMD processor and 128 or 256 megs of RAM. I cannot get Ubuntu to even open Firefox in an acceptable time (like, I could run a lap around my house, pour and drink a glass of water, and still get back in time to be pissed off with the load time)

Ubuntu is not lightweight anymore. Even Xubuntu really pushes that definition. I mean REALLY pushes that definition. It's a good OS, but small and light: nay.

Once you get it on a strong computer, sure it takes up less RAM, but thats because XP will take a bit more when it gets a bit more to optimize itself. Really, unless its a P4, don't try ubuntu, unless you want to see the flaw in Ubuntu in a very very painful way.

+1, Ubuntu runs great on my quad core beast but on my older laptop and my grandmother's PC (which ran XP at the speed of light!) it is quite slow.

In fact Ubuntu is a bit slower on my gradmother's PC of a better spec than my laptop. Nothing wrong with the install or services running, that's just how it is

**mikjp** · August 4th, 2008

Originally Posted by scottuss

+1, Ubuntu runs great on my quad core beast but on my older laptop and my grandmother's PC (which ran XP at the speed of light!) it is quite slow.

Why compare Ubuntu of 2008 to XP released in 2001? You get a lot more functionality in Ubuntu than in an ancient XP.

I cannot see any great difference between the performance of XP and openSUSE 11.0 when using it with my "new" Pentium 2400 with 512 MB RAM.

Greetings,

mikko

**chucky chuckaluck** · August 4th, 2008

Originally Posted by mikjp

Add pypanel to any *box and you have a taskbar. On the other hand, IceWM's default installation has a start menu and taskbar.

the only problem with icewm is that the startmenu and the taskbar come preconfigured with some pretty odd entries. (at least it did about four months ago.)

**scottuss** · August 4th, 2008

I appreciate that they are very different, all I'm saying is that a lot of people try to argue Ubuntu is faster than Windows XP, which it is not on some machines.

Don't get me wrong I prefer Ubuntu to Windows any day, I just had to point out that for my grandmother her PC is decent enough and runs Ubuntu quite slowly, thus reinforcing the fact that Ubuntu is no longer as light as it used to be

**sharks** · August 4th, 2008

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=850927

Dont use too much eye candy

**mikjp** · August 4th, 2008

Originally Posted by chucky chuckaluck

the only problem with icewm is that the startmenu and the taskbar come preconfigured with some pretty odd entries. (at least it did about four months ago.)

It takes two minutes with a text editor to get rid of the unnecessary entries and add only those needed.

-> http://www.icewm.org/FAQ/IceWM-FAQ-4.html#ss4.1

Greetings,

Mikko

**snowpine** · August 4th, 2008

Xubuntu would be noticably faster on that computer, and 99% as user-friendly. I would also recommend checking out Crunchbang, because in my opinion it is the most "mom-friendly" openbox distro out there (especially if you change the default black & white artwork to happy flowers or something).