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Well...Hello

I bought a new laptop a Dell E6430 i7 with 8 gig of ram.

I installed 14.04 and expected it to run amazingly quick.

My old laptop , just an Intel dual core with 2gig of ram is so much quicker. It ran on Ubuntu 13.

Anyone have any idea ?... I have run the updates. Do I need to re-install?

Bert

Bert
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  • In far most cases, performance issues are related to (issues with) graphics cards and drivers. I would check the graphics card (type) and look up if it has known issues / solutions. I would also try to switch drivers first (Software Center > Software Sources > Extra Drivers). – Jacob Vlijm Nov 07 '14 at 18:15
  • Unity, the default desktop environment, can be very slow (due to extra effects, dash search, etc) - you may want to try another Desktop Environment - some are listed here. – Wilf Nov 07 '14 at 18:28
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    @Wilf It runs like butter on my 8 years old Toshiba :), and OP's laptop seems much more powerfull. – Jacob Vlijm Nov 07 '14 at 18:30
  • Just had a thought, what graphics + drivers are you using? Can you please edit your question and add the output of lspci -k? – Wilf Nov 07 '14 at 21:16

3 Answers3

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Here are some suggestions you could try:

  • Install the packages preload and prelink. Preload monitors which programs you start after login and prefetches the libraries of those into the RAM at login. Prelink profiles where libraries are located, so they will load faster.

  • Check your Graphics Card driver. If you're using a AMD or nVidia card, you could try a proprietary driver. To get an overview of available proprietary drivers, open Software & Updates, then go to the Additional Drivers tab.*

  • Turn down the swappiness. The swappiness is the value which defines the tendency to move unused RAM content to the SWAP partition (if any) to free more RAM. Sounds nice, doesn't it? The downside: Swapping is slow. If your computer is swapping all the time, you don't have resources left for your own. The default swappiness is 60, a value far too high on desktop systems. I've turned my swappiness down to 10, but you could even go so far to turn it down to 1, or even disable it by setting 0, if you want to.
    To modify the swappiness, open the file /etc/sysctl.conf in your preferred text editor as root. At the bottom of the file, add the line vm.swappiness = 10 (or any other value you want to have). Ensure that another, empty line follows. Now save and reboot.

  • To improve boot speed, activate boot profiling. To do this, open the file /etc/default/grub in your favorite text editor as sudo, and add the word profile into the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT argument. It may look like this afterwards: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash profile". Now save and quit the text editor. Run sudo update-grub to load the changes into the boot loader. The next boot will be a bit slower, as the boot profile is being created. Afterwards your computer should boot faster.

If neither of above steps helps, it might be problems with some other component of your computer. Finding out which one will be a tough job... And even if you find out, there is no guarantee that there's a (better) device driver for Linux.

*If you're using a AMD Accelerated CPU, you have to install the fglrx driver in order to let the system manage the CPU speed. Else the CPU will stay at it's lowest possible speed.

s3lph
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Is this your only installation on your Laptop ? If not how much is that partition , and what kind of Hard Disk do you use ? Do you have the right drivers installed ? I have found that in some cases that something as simple as free-space available , especially in a smaller partition can make a big difference in performance. I used to run ubuntu 14.04 fairly slow when i had a 20GB HDD partition with around 6GB of Swap space. Once i expanded it out to 150GB it was just much quicker. Im not sure if this is something causing an apparent lag . Also the other answers are very true (SWAP space / Drivers) . Also , this might be obvious , but you do need to make sure you have the 64bit flavor :).

Sreekanth Narayanaswamy
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Check you CPU speed stepping ; I had strange issues with ondemand mode and it sticking on low power too much -- in my case I use mains so performance mode sorted it. I installed cpufrequtils.

cw2095
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