Why does the Screen momentarily go dull and the open windows get unresponsive?

Question

I am an illiterate in computer knowledge, more so with Linux. Vexed of Windows OS, I installed Ubuntu 16.04LTS on my PC for the 1st time and would like to stick with Ubuntu forever. But from time to time, the screen goes dull and windows freeze. It regains life after a few moments (of frustration). Can someone here educate me on this annoying aspect please?

Answer 1

This is where a process is happening that is taking some time to complete. It does this to prevent further actions being taken, the window becomes unresponsive. It is normal for this to happen. It may be that you could do with a faster computer or some optimisation. It depends what you have running at the time and if this happens with one program in particular, such as eclipse (optimisation of the config file usually helps with quite a bit). You can always run a system monitor whilst performing these actions to see what process is causing this extra load. Keep an eye on CPU and memory usage for each process. You can do this from a terminal window by running the top command.