8.04 Problems

[Rucas]

Hi all, im hopping to get some help so that i may carry on enjoying my Ubuntu.
Anyhowz here are the issues.
I have Ubuntu on 2 machines, a Toshiba Satelite A30 laptop with 512mb ram, 30gig hdd and its a Intel Celleron clocking @ 2ghz. The other is a project made Desktop machine now pushing retirement, lol... Also very similar specs but more HDD.

The Laptop:
Ubuntu Gutsy run rather well on it, in fact all devices worked perfectly, and the system was pretty happy. I Upgraded via the online option to 8.04 and now have a serious problem where the laptop will not even start up at times, takes a really long time to start up when eventually it does, and it really is feeling slower in performance and such.
I dont have Compiz or any fancy graphics stuff enabled, and the HDD is about half empty.

My questions:
Are there any System Managememnt Tools in Linux(Ubuntu) like a Disk Defrager, or a Permissions Repair or anything that fine tunes the machine when it starts feeling slow and slugish? Or any Terminal commands?
Also i would prefer to not have to downgrade from 8.04, i like the new additions, just really wanted a better performance.
Lastly is it maybe better to Upgrade by doing a fresh install from the CD instead of upgrade?

Many thanks in advance...

[tamoneya]

first of all you may fix almost all of your problems by just doing a fresh install. My laptop got messed up when I tried the upgrade although my desktop made it through alright. I just reinstalled from scratch on the laptop and it was all fixed. As for clean up tools: ubuntu uses ext3 filesystem for the most part and this is a journaled filesystem and that causes it to not fragment like NTFS (windows). As for permissions repair you can just use chmod
sudo chmod 755 /directory/ The other terminal command I like to use to clean things up is
sudo apt-get cleanThis remove extra downloaded packages that have already been installed.

[bobnutfield]

Many have experienced similar issues with performance, particularly on laptops, after doing an upgrade rather than a fresh install. There are a number of files that get left over and tracking down exactly what the prpblem is may be very difficult. You can check dmesg for any errors and also check the logs in the System menu for any clues. But, I can tell you that if you are able to back you data with relative ease, I think you will wise to do a fresh install. If you are dual booting, Hardy will take of this for you.

Best regards

Bob

[Rucas]

Many thanks for the answers, i think im going to try a fresh install.
Thank you both for the speedy replies.

[tofuconfetti]

FWIW, I never do upgrades. It's just not that hard to back up your home directory. Put all the .directories (directories starting with a period) for programs you use a lot and all the docs, pictures, etc you want to keep on an external hard drive.

A fresh install always runs better in my experience. I know why Linux distributions try to go the upgrade path, and it does work most of the time, but the performance seems to uniformly suffer.