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I have a Dell desktop running Ubuntu 16.04 with an 80 GB hard drive (27 GB space available) and 4 GB RAM.

It has started to work very slowly display grey screens for the last 6-8 weeks. The internet provider is ~8Mb and I have run anti-malware checks which resulted nothing. . I only use it for internet shopping and rarely download anything so how can I increase the performance and speed?

Kaz Wolfe
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user663114
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    An 80GB HDD in 2017 is living on borrowed time. Use the Disks tool to check it before anything else. Also edit your question and post other hardware specs. –  Mar 08 '17 at 20:50
  • Outside the disk check, you can watch how system processes use your RAM and check, what starts duing your system startup. @CelticWarrior I have few smaller and maybe older disks for testing and Linuxes on them are fresh and quick (to the extent possible). – BlueManCZ Mar 08 '17 at 22:06

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All I can think about your situation is that its a main memory (RAM) problem.

Since you use your machine basically for browsing, one advice I can give you is to avoid opening a lot of tabs on your browser.

Also I highly recommend to change your desktop environment to something more lightweight in order to have more free memory. Very good information can be found here about the available environments: What kinds of desktop environments and shells are available?.

You can also search for a lightweight browser.

I were in a similar situation a few months ago and preferred xfce, although I found later that lxde is a little bit more lightweight.

Hope it helps.

Community
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  • Thanks for you help it's only the Ubuntu 16.04 computer that is slow and grey screens the Microsoft computers are OK. Is my computer too old or is it an Ubuntu problem? – user663114 Mar 12 '17 at 13:13
  • I think both. Just try a different desktop environment and see if it goes better. You have nothing to lose! –  Mar 12 '17 at 20:25