Does she have her POP account configured to leave mail on the server? That's a very intensive process since Thunderbird has to compare the contents of her local storage to the contents of her mailbox on the server when it retrieves new messages. If she only retrieves mail using this computer, then turn off that option. If she wants to retrieve her mail from multiple locations, she should be using IMAP instead of POP.
I don't see much difference among the various weather providers myself. I use either Accuweather or WeatherBug on my Android phone, and ForecastFox (fixed), which uses Accuweather, on Firefox. I like WeatherBug because it has a database with all the little local stations like schools, fire stations, libraries, and the like. One of them was at a school across the street from where my daughter went to college, so I always knew what her local weather was. My phone points to our local high school a few blocks away. ForecastFox puts those handy little icons and popups in the status bar. I rarely visit the Accuweather site itself.
Run "top" from the command line and look at the memory in use. Don't worry if it looks like it is all in use; it should be. The memory not being used for programs is used to cache disk transactions instead. Here's what my 8 GB machine looks like:
Code:
top - 20:57:45 up 2 days, 8:43, 14 users, load average: 0.09, 0.16, 0.21
Tasks: 229 total, 2 running, 226 sleeping, 0 stopped, 1 zombie
%Cpu(s): 1.3 us, 0.3 sy, 0.0 ni, 98.4 id, 0.0 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.0 si, 0.0 st
KiB Mem: 8044208 total, 7508804 used, 535404 free, 364928 buffers
KiB Swap: 15998972 total, 0 used, 15998972 free. 5470412 cached Mem
This is with Kubuntu 14.04 and an Intel i5. My load averages are very low; the first figure is instantaneous, the others are medium- and long-term averages. On desktop machines those numbers should be well under two, especially the long-term average. If they're not, the machine is pretty hard at work. As for memory, I have 8.0 G total, but 5.47 G of that is used to cache disk transactions. The programs themselves are only occupying about 2 G. I set aside 16 G of disk space for swap; so far Linux hasn't found a need for any of it.
The most effective single upgrade you can buy is more memory. If top shows most of the memory in use and little available for caching, I'd invest in memory. A little browsing shows a compatible 8 GB stick is about $42. The listing says its "laptop memory," but it's the one the Newegg memory finder returns for an Inspiron 3646. Just look in the box and compare.
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Originally Posted by SeijiSensei
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