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How can I improve overall system performance?

I have recently installed Ubuntu 11.10 in my hp pavilion t440m (this is a pc, not a laptop; with extra ram, now 1.5G) and I am experiencing some problems with my performance: one clear example of this is that having two tabs opened on firefox, only gmail and facebook, makes it use up to 80% or more of the CPU, and the change of tabs sometimes takes too long or gets stuck for a few seconds.

At first I had installed 12.04, but apparently the 32 bits version had some problems with the recognition of some nvidia cards or something like that. I have now reinstalled this older version and installed the drivers (using "Additional Drivers" interface) but I suspect that they may be failing somewhere else, because I think I meet all the hardware requirements for using ubuntu comfortably and yet it seems to be working awfully (I am using the gnome desktop, without special effects).

Am I missing something? Is there any way to check that the drivers are working properly? What else could be my problem?

Should you need any more information please let me know (I think that other than the ram, the computer should have all the specifications of the model)

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Nordico
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    just to give us an idea of what we might be looking at the next time your computer becomes slow and unresponsive please open a terminal and type 'top' watch it for about 30 seconds and report what services were at the top of the list (the most cpu intensive) – Daniel W. Sep 04 '12 at 00:56
  • Jorge: I would expect the system to work smoothly for at least a couple of days after fresh installation without having to make special adjustments. Perhaps I'm mistaken, but the kind of things you solve by improving performance are not the problems that appear so early; this has to be some deeper issue... – Nordico Sep 04 '12 at 01:33
  • Daniel: Firefox and Xorg (Xorg goes around 5-20% all the time, while firefox is low but pikes in over 50% when switching tabs or the like) – Nordico Sep 04 '12 at 01:37
  • Check your driver version. If you are using nouveau or nvidia-173 (Nvidia driver version 173), these could be responsible for your slowness. I personally have trouble with both, including lockups when using nouveau. Also - try using a different browser. Does it slow down in chrome or epiphany? –  Sep 04 '12 at 03:10
  • I have "nvidia accelerated graphics drivers (version 96)" active, as it was the recommended, but also lists the same but "post release updates". I tried switching between the two but things didn't improve. You mention "version 173"; perhaps my drivers are outdated? or might it ok for the video card (I couldn't find the model, but it is a Geforce with 64 MB DDR)? – Nordico Sep 06 '12 at 12:47
  • This is not a duplicate: I am NOT asking for tips to improve performance, I am trying to find out if my performance problems are unavoidable or, as I suspect, are due to some bad coniguration. All tips in the other post are extras; none of those checks if things are working as they are supposed to be working in the first place. I don't want to just improve the performance; I want to check if the bad performance is a symptom of something else that needs solving, before just trying to patch it. That other post doesn't help me at all in that. – Nordico Sep 08 '12 at 15:08

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