Pentium 4 slow as an old carthorse

[fuddlestack]

Greetings. Crass newbie at the wheel...

I just installed 10.04 Desktop onto an external USB disk and used it to boot an old Acer Veriton 7600G with a Pentium 4 CPU clocked at 2.80 GHz, 3 Gb of memory and an AGP Sapphire ATI Radeon video card with 512 Mb of DDR2.

With nothing running, nothing swapping, only 7% of memory in use, and around 11% of both CPUs, this system is so slow that with no programs running it takes about 5 seconds to switch between dropdown menus in the main Applications/Places/System menu. The standard GMatrix screensaver takes forever to crank out a single character.

I'd be grateful for any suggestions or speculations as to reasons, tests I might run, etc.

[sydbat]

Greetings. Crass newbie at the wheel...

I just installed 10.04 Desktop onto an external USB disk and used it to boot an old Acer Veriton 7600G with a Pentium 4 CPU clocked at 2.80 GHz, 3 Gb of memory and an AGP Sapphire ATI Radeon video card with 512 Mb of DDR2.

With nothing running, nothing swapping, only 7% of memory in use, and around 11% of both CPUs, this system is so slow that with no programs running it takes about 5 seconds to switch between dropdown menus in the main Applications/Places/System menu. The standard GMatrix screensaver takes forever to crank out a single character.

I'd be grateful for any suggestions or speculations as to reasons, tests I might run, etc.Most likely the ATI card. Older ATI graphics cards are not supported by AMD/ATI anymore. The open driver automatically installed may or may not work 100% either.

Also, turn off any 'Desktop Effects' (System > Preferences > Appearance).

[fuddlestack]

Most likely the ATI card. Older ATI graphics cards are not supported by AMD/ATI anymore. The open driver automatically installed may or may not work 100% either.

Also, turn off any 'Desktop Effects' (System > Preferences > Appearance).

Well, it was new when I bought it...;)

That did it. Thank-you, sir.

I rather suspected video... are there any utilities going that would let one put a finger on such bottlenecks?

[sydbat]

Well, it was new when I bought it...;)

That did it. Thank-you, sir.

I rather suspected video... are there any utilities going that would let one put a finger on such bottlenecks?You've found the best one here - the Ubuntu Forums!

[dabl]

are there any utilities going that would let one put a finger on such bottlenecks?

"top" will show the running processes, in descending order of resource (CPU and memory) consumption. The one sucking the most resources will be on ... {wait for it ...} ... top. :lolflag:

[tgalati4]

Open a terminal:

sudo apt-get install htop
htop