Ubuntu 14.04 very laggy

[marshal-banana]

hi, I have Acer e725 laptop , 2gb ram, dual boot, win xp sp3, ubuntu 14.04. Ubuntu 14.04 is very laggy and freezes alot especially at web browsing, and images scrolling, and grays alot,, how can I solve this?? thx

[TheFu]

Don't use Unity, which is a hog.
Look into xfce4 or lxde or a pure WM solution instead. These are designed for low-spec hardware like you have. Doing things to limit the memory usage would help too. Browsers these days suck RAM and think nothing of using 1.5G for themselves.

I have a netbook with 2G of RAM. It has a relatively fast processor and SSD, but the RAM is a limiting thing. I have to watch memory use to ensure the RAM + swap don't get fully used and the system crashes/locks up. If you cannot add more RAM (I cannot), consider making the swap partition larger - 2G-4G would normally be the recommended size, perhaps 6G would provide the elbow room needed? BTW, I'm think about this for my own situation too.


$ swapon -s
Filename Type Size Used Priority
/dev/sda2 partition 2150396 305836 -1

I have 2G for swap and it is currently using about 300M - I'm good right now - but with lots of tabs open in FF and a few doing flash or javascript - that 2G swap can easily be exhausted.

That is why using a lighter DE will help too - less RAM used, means more spare RAM to run programs.

Install lxde with
sudo apt-get install lxde
Then logout, click on the gear near the login, select LXDE, type in your password and everything should seem a little faster. If you like it, you can purge Unity. No OS install/reinstall needed. A similar command for xfce4 will work too.

[marshal-banana]

thx alot

[frankmorris2]

Hello,

I would also suggest to take a look at Lubuntu, the Ubuntu OS using a LXDE environment.

It works well on my aging machines.

Have a nice day.