Re: [ubuntu-uk] Poor performance with Ubuntu on my laptop
On Thu, 04 Oct 2012 18:11:38 +0100 Gareth France gareth.fra...@gmail.com wrote: [ snip ] This machine was bought because it was buy now pay next year. The alternative was watch my old system die of old age and do without! My choices were limited. Interesting thread. I buy recycled electronics where I can for pale green reasons, and because my use need are simple, and I seem to have had good luck. Laptop: Lenovo thinkpad X200s around £130 off the well known auction site. Runs 12.04 really well, manages Firefox with a dozen tabs open, LibreOffice with large files loaded and a remote desktop connection to work desktop (I use rdesktop, remmina seems broken). I get 4 hours on battery with wifi. A student asked if it was 'the new Mac' the other week because Unity does look a bit cool. 4Gb ram. No chance on HDMI though. PC: ancient Xeon dual core HP workstation with a new Nvidia card of modest spec, cost just under £200 including the card. 4 Gb ram, seems to just run everything. I'm actually using IceWM of all things on this because I like tiled windows (3 by 3) on the big monitor. The HP case is huge and can be opened easily. -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
Re: [ubuntu-uk] Poor performance with Ubuntu on my laptop
On 05/10/12 20:46, keith wrote: Interesting thread. I buy recycled electronics where I can for pale green reasons, and because my use need are simple, and I seem to have had good luck. Laptop: Lenovo thinkpad X200s around £130 off the well known auction site. Runs 12.04 really well, manages Firefox with a dozen tabs open, LibreOffice with large files loaded and a remote desktop connection to work desktop (I use rdesktop, remmina seems broken). I get 4 hours on battery with wifi. A student asked if it was 'the new Mac' the other week because Unity does look a bit cool. 4Gb ram. No chance on HDMI though. PC: ancient Xeon dual core HP workstation with a new Nvidia card of modest spec, cost just under £200 including the card. 4 Gb ram, seems to just run everything. I'm actually using IceWM of all things on this because I like tiled windows (3 by 3) on the big monitor. The HP case is huge and can be opened easily. I've had the mac line too. It's a great sales pitch when they realise they are wrong! However it's obvious this laptop should be performing much better. -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
Re: [ubuntu-uk] Poor performance with Ubuntu on my laptop
On 2012-10-04 16:05, Liam Proven wrote: On 4 October 2012 15:54, Gareth France gareth.fra...@gmail.com wrote: Both have the Pentium P6200 processor. Unfortunately, Intel is rather addicted to selling cheap, crippled CPUs which have been hobbled to fit a low price point by disabling most of their onboard cache memory. This dramatically reduces performance. Wow. Checking on that CPU, I can't believe it is still being sold: http://ark.intel.com/products/50176/Intel-Pentium-Processor-P6200-3M-Cache-2_13-GHz It doesn't even have VT-x! I'm sorry, Gareth, but I have no suggestions for you. Consider using Gnome 2 or XFCE. Regards, Tyler -- [...] freedom is kind of a hobby with me, and I have disposable income that I'll spend to find out how to get people more of it. -- Penn Jillette -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
Re: [ubuntu-uk] Poor performance with Ubuntu on my laptop
On 04/10/12 15:54, Gareth France wrote: I was thrilled when I recently got a brand new laptop for the 2nd time in my life. It's a budget model but I figured with 4Gb DDR3 and a 500Gb HDD it was a massive improvement over my ageing dell which had only a 60Gb drive. The new machine was a catalogue purchase where they listed it as simply having a Pentium processor. I joked at the time that this either means they were too lazy to type i3 or that it comes with a processor from 1995! It is a Packard Bell EasyNote TK85. Little did I know how right I was! The performance is a joke! Playing music in Banshee while browsing web pages leads to light skipping. Using certain sites firefox greys out and freezes every 30 seconds or so! It's just not coping. I never ran Windows on it, wiping the drive before it completed the first boot was extremely satisfying, however having realised a friend's Acer 5733z is literally identical, all bar cosmetic changes to the trackpad, power button etc, it got me thinking. They haven't complained about anything on their machine. Both have the Pentium P6200 processor. I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 32 bit on there at the moment. I was wondering if someone could suggest a distro which is less podgy to install and see if that works any better. Thanks Gareth You could try simply installing the lubuntu desktop, this will then retain the advantages of ubuntu in terms of say software centre, apt- repositories etc, but use the lxde desktop which is less resource hungry. Plus you won't have to re-install everything. Paul -- -- http://drupal.zleap.net skype : psutton111 http://www.linkedin.com/pub/paul-sutton/36/595/911 http://www.raspberrypi.org http://www.ubuntu.com -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
Re: [ubuntu-uk] Poor performance with Ubuntu on my laptop
On 4 October 2012 15:54, Gareth France gareth.fra...@gmail.com wrote: I was thrilled when I recently got a brand new laptop for the 2nd time in my life. It's a budget model but I figured with 4Gb DDR3 and a 500Gb HDD it was a massive improvement over my ageing dell which had only a 60Gb drive. The new machine was a catalogue purchase where they listed it as simply having a Pentium processor. I joked at the time that this either means they were too lazy to type i3 or that it comes with a processor from 1995! It is a Packard Bell EasyNote TK85. Little did I know how right I was! The performance is a joke! Playing music in Banshee while browsing web pages leads to light skipping. Using certain sites firefox greys out and freezes every 30 seconds or so! It's just not coping. I never ran Windows on it, wiping the drive before it completed the first boot was extremely satisfying, however having realised a friend's Acer 5733z is literally identical, all bar cosmetic changes to the trackpad, power button etc, it got me thinking. They haven't complained about anything on their machine. Both have the Pentium P6200 processor. I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 32 bit on there at the moment. I was wondering if someone could suggest a distro which is less podgy to install and see if that works any better. It might be worth selecting unity-2d at logon time (click on the gear next to the user name in the logon screen and select unity-2d) to see if that helps. In fact it probably will not as you are probably already using unity-2d as the graphics h/w likely does not support 3d anyway. Worth a go though. Otherwise, as others have suggested, try Lubuntu. Colin -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
Re: [ubuntu-uk] Poor performance with Ubuntu on my laptop
Could you please confirm that your cpu is this one: http://ark.intel.com/products/50176/Intel-Pentium-Processor-P6200-3M-Cache-2_13-GHz I have ubuntu running on a t6500 (which in terms of passmark benchmarks is very similar) and it runs very well. While intel at the low end do turn things off. while the processor may not be as powerfull it may be a bug/glitch.does the live version off a distro(usb stick) produce the same results-if 12.04 is lagging then windows 7 will definitely lag(assuming it came with 7, or xp) even worse-since it has a gazillion of services to start. you could try xubuntu as well to see whether that works or debian- if I am correct both use .deb format so most of the ubuntu packages may work. If you still have a restore partition to windows 7(or cd's) it might be worth installing just to make sure that it is the performance of the processor and not a bug from the 12.04 install-you can always delete it later. On 4 October 2012 16:05, Liam Proven lpro...@gmail.com wrote: On 4 October 2012 15:54, Gareth France gareth.fra...@gmail.com wrote: I was thrilled when I recently got a brand new laptop for the 2nd time in my life. It's a budget model but I figured with 4Gb DDR3 and a 500Gb HDD it was a massive improvement over my ageing dell which had only a 60Gb drive. The new machine was a catalogue purchase where they listed it as simply having a Pentium processor. I joked at the time that this either means they were too lazy to type i3 or that it comes with a processor from 1995! It is a Packard Bell EasyNote TK85. Little did I know how right I was! The performance is a joke! Playing music in Banshee while browsing web pages leads to light skipping. Using certain sites firefox greys out and freezes every 30 seconds or so! It's just not coping. I never ran Windows on it, wiping the drive before it completed the first boot was extremely satisfying, however having realised a friend's Acer 5733z is literally identical, all bar cosmetic changes to the trackpad, power button etc, it got me thinking. They haven't complained about anything on their machine. Both have the Pentium P6200 processor. I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 32 bit on there at the moment. I was wondering if someone could suggest a distro which is less podgy to install and see if that works any better. Unfortunately, Intel is rather addicted to selling cheap, crippled CPUs which have been hobbled to fit a low price point by disabling most of their onboard cache memory. This dramatically reduces performance. It's a false economy - they cost as much to make as upmarket chips, as they are the same silicon with some features present but disabled. It's part of a stepped marketing model where sales of lots of cheap crippled products sold for a tiny profit are balanced by very overpriced premium products at vastly inflated prices and very high profit margins. It's a filthy tactic which is unfair to consumers, but Intel is damned near a monopoly and what can you do? It started with the 486SX, which was a 486DX with the floating-point unit turned off. It's made them billions. For years, I used AMD or Cyrix kit from preference but they are no longer really competitive except at the very cheap end - the low-end AMD chips are not crippled, as Celerons and Pentium Dual Core ones are. Seriously, your best bet might be to overclock the chip. These cheap crippled chips often overclock very well. Or, teach yourself some basic maintenance skills, buy an uncrippled chip swap the CPU over. Google to see if this is possible. As for lighter-weight distros, I am not sure they will help much - you have lots of RAM and possibly a competent GPU too - but you could try Lubuntu. -- Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lpro...@hotmail.com • Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 • Cell: +44 7939-087884 -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/ -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
Re: [ubuntu-uk] Poor performance with Ubuntu on my laptop
Unfortunately, Intel is rather addicted to selling cheap, crippled CPUs which have been hobbled to fit a low price point by disabling most of their onboard cache memory. This dramatically reduces performance. It's a false economy - they cost as much to make as upmarket chips, as they are the same silicon with some features present but disabled. It's part of a stepped marketing model where sales of lots of cheap crippled products sold for a tiny profit are balanced by very overpriced premium products at vastly inflated prices and very high profit margins. It's a filthy tactic which is unfair to consumers, but Intel is damned near a monopoly and what can you do? It started with the 486SX, which was a 486DX with the floating-point unit turned off. It's made them billions. For years, I used AMD or Cyrix kit from preference but they are no longer really competitive except at the very cheap end - the low-end AMD chips are not crippled, as Celerons and Pentium Dual Core ones are. Seriously, your best bet might be to overclock the chip. These cheap crippled chips often overclock very well. Or, teach yourself some basic maintenance skills, buy an uncrippled chip swap the CPU over. Google to see if this is possible. As for lighter-weight distros, I am not sure they will help much - you have lots of RAM and possibly a competent GPU too - but you could try Lubuntu. I'm not a fan of the Ubuntu spin offs to be honest. I have no idea how I'd go about overclocking a modern machine however I'm an IT technician myself so replacing the CPU is an idea I could consider later down the line. I know for a fact several versions of the machine exist some sporting i3 or better processors so I would hope it's removable. Thanks -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
Re: [ubuntu-uk] Poor performance with Ubuntu on my laptop
On 04/10/12 16:18, Colin Law wrote: On 4 October 2012 15:54, Gareth France gareth.fra...@gmail.com wrote: I was thrilled when I recently got a brand new laptop for the 2nd time in my life. It's a budget model but I figured with 4Gb DDR3 and a 500Gb HDD it was a massive improvement over my ageing dell which had only a 60Gb drive. The new machine was a catalogue purchase where they listed it as simply having a Pentium processor. I joked at the time that this either means they were too lazy to type i3 or that it comes with a processor from 1995! It is a Packard Bell EasyNote TK85. Little did I know how right I was! The performance is a joke! Playing music in Banshee while browsing web pages leads to light skipping. Using certain sites firefox greys out and freezes every 30 seconds or so! It's just not coping. I never ran Windows on it, wiping the drive before it completed the first boot was extremely satisfying, however having realised a friend's Acer 5733z is literally identical, all bar cosmetic changes to the trackpad, power button etc, it got me thinking. They haven't complained about anything on their machine. Both have the Pentium P6200 processor. I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 32 bit on there at the moment. I was wondering if someone could suggest a distro which is less podgy to install and see if that works any better. It might be worth selecting unity-2d at logon time (click on the gear next to the user name in the logon screen and select unity-2d) to see if that helps. In fact it probably will not as you are probably already using unity-2d as the graphics h/w likely does not support 3d anyway. Worth a go though. Otherwise, as others have suggested, try Lubuntu. Colin I'm using unity 3d but in some ways the machine excels, it ships with an HDMI port and as I said when using Windows on the Acer there are no issues. I was thinking there must be a lot to be saved by using a non Ubuntu distro or seriously tweaking Ubuntu. For instance do I really need the bluetooth features on a laptop without bluetooth? As for Unity 2D, I'm loathed to do that is it's a stop-gap, what will I do in future versions where 2D is being removed? -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
Re: [ubuntu-uk] Poor performance with Ubuntu on my laptop
On 04/10/12 16:21, Anton Kanishchev wrote: Could you please confirm that your cpu is this one: http://ark.intel.com/products/50176/Intel-Pentium-Processor-P6200-3M-Cache-2_13-GHz I have ubuntu running on a t6500 (which in terms of passmark benchmarks is very similar) and it runs very well. While intel at the low end do turn things off. while the processor may not be as powerfull it may be a bug/glitch.does the live version off a distro(usb stick) produce the same results-if 12.04 is lagging then windows 7 will definitely lag(assuming it came with 7, or xp) even worse-since it has a gazillion of services to start. you could try xubuntu as well to see whether that works or debian- if I am correct both use .deb format so most of the ubuntu packages may work. If you still have a restore partition to windows 7(or cd's) it might be worth installing just to make sure that it is the performance of the processor and not a bug from the 12.04 install-you can always delete it later. I deleted the restore partition, I have no intention of using Windows on it, ever. However remember my Friend's Acer is running perfectly on Win 7 and it's identical. -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
Re: [ubuntu-uk] Poor performance with Ubuntu on my laptop
On 4 October 2012 16:28, Gareth France gareth.fra...@gmail.com wrote: I'm using unity 3d but in some ways the machine excels, it ships with an HDMI port and as I said when using Windows on the Acer there are no issues. I was thinking there must be a lot to be saved by using a non Ubuntu distro or seriously tweaking Ubuntu. For instance do I really need the bluetooth features on a laptop without bluetooth? As for Unity 2D, I'm loathed to do that is it's a stop-gap, what will I do in future versions where 2D is being removed? Still worth trying it to see if it makes a difference. All you have to do is log out and in again. Are you sure it is using 3d? It seems surprising that they would spend money on 3d graphics h/w with a low spec processor. If the h/w will not support it then Ubuntu will silently drop back to 2d. Colin -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
Re: [ubuntu-uk] Poor performance with Ubuntu on my laptop
On 04/10/12 16:33, Colin Law wrote: On 4 October 2012 16:28, Gareth France gareth.fra...@gmail.com wrote: I'm using unity 3d but in some ways the machine excels, it ships with an HDMI port and as I said when using Windows on the Acer there are no issues. I was thinking there must be a lot to be saved by using a non Ubuntu distro or seriously tweaking Ubuntu. For instance do I really need the bluetooth features on a laptop without bluetooth? As for Unity 2D, I'm loathed to do that is it's a stop-gap, what will I do in future versions where 2D is being removed? Still worth trying it to see if it makes a difference. All you have to do is log out and in again. Are you sure it is using 3d? It seems surprising that they would spend money on 3d graphics h/w with a low spec processor. If the h/w will not support it then Ubuntu will silently drop back to 2d. Colin Yes, today I'm experiencing the extremely frustrating issue with Libreoffice calc where the unity icon in the bar doesn't show it's loaded. Every time you click to switch to calc it loads a new instance. Also the laptop has HDMI, what would be the point of HDMI without a reasonable graphics chipset? -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
Re: [ubuntu-uk] Poor performance with Ubuntu on my laptop
On 4 October 2012 15:54, Gareth France gareth.fra...@gmail.com wrote: I was thrilled when I recently got a brand new laptop for the 2nd time in my life. It's a budget model but I figured with 4Gb DDR3 and a 500Gb HDD it was a massive improvement over my ageing dell which had only a 60Gb drive. The new machine was a catalogue purchase where they listed it as simply having a Pentium processor. I joked at the time that this either means they were too lazy to type i3 or that it comes with a processor from 1995! It is a Packard Bell EasyNote TK85. Little did I know how right I was! The performance is a joke! Playing music in Banshee while browsing web pages leads to light skipping. Using certain sites firefox greys out and freezes every 30 seconds or so! It's just not coping. Try chromium browser to see if that is better. FF can be processor hungry. Choosing the right apps may be more important than the distribution. sudo apt-get install chromium-browser Colin -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
Re: [ubuntu-uk] Poor performance with Ubuntu on my laptop
Try chromium browser to see if that is better. FF can be processor hungry. Choosing the right apps may be more important than the distribution. sudo apt-get install chromium-browser Colin As much as I appreciate what you're saying don't you think something is very wrong here? On my antique Dell I would routinely have Vuze open downloading, firefox running up to 6 or 7 tabs, VLC playing music or video, Thunderbird and Calc with up to 2 spreadsheets, one of them has 2 sheets each with 3600 lines of data in them. That machine coped fine, if it wasn't for the lack of battery and dodgy power socket I'd much rather be using that. Any brand new machine, however badly designed, should be capable of outperforming something which came with 60Gb HDD and no more than 1Gb RAM. What difference, if any, do you think using 64 bit would make? -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
Re: [ubuntu-uk] Poor performance with Ubuntu on my laptop
Hi Gareth You don't say how long ago you bought it or exactly how you bought it, but you may be able to cancel your order and return it under distance selling regulations, see http://www.adviceguide.org.uk/england/consumer_e/does_the_distance_sale_cooling-off_period_apply_to_you.htm Even if you cannot take advantage of this, it is worth others noting that you can get this right to return something you just don't like provided you decide quickly enough Tony On 4 October 2012 15:54, Gareth France gareth.fra...@gmail.com wrote: I was thrilled when I recently got a brand new laptop for the 2nd time in my life. It's a budget model but I figured with 4Gb DDR3 and a 500Gb HDD it was a massive improvement over my ageing dell which had only a 60Gb drive. The new machine was a catalogue purchase where they listed it as simply having a Pentium processor. I joked at the time that this either means they were too lazy to type i3 or that it comes with a processor from 1995! It is a Packard Bell EasyNote TK85. Little did I know how right I was! The performance is a joke! Playing music in Banshee while browsing web pages leads to light skipping. Using certain sites firefox greys out and freezes every 30 seconds or so! It's just not coping. I never ran Windows on it, wiping the drive before it completed the first boot was extremely satisfying, however having realised a friend's Acer 5733z is literally identical, all bar cosmetic changes to the trackpad, power button etc, it got me thinking. They haven't complained about anything on their machine. Both have the Pentium P6200 processor. I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 32 bit on there at the moment. I was wondering if someone could suggest a distro which is less podgy to install and see if that works any better. Thanks Gareth -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
Re: [ubuntu-uk] Poor performance with Ubuntu on my laptop
Bring it along to the release party on the 18th and we can have a poke at it. I would try Quantal 64bit on it personally, There have been quite a lot of performance improvements and things have been largely unbroken with Unity in general. Alan. -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
Re: [ubuntu-uk] Poor performance with Ubuntu on my laptop
On 4 October 2012 16:43, Gareth France gareth.fra...@gmail.com wrote: Try chromium browser to see if that is better. FF can be processor hungry. Choosing the right apps may be more important than the distribution. sudo apt-get install chromium-browser Colin As much as I appreciate what you're saying don't you think something is very wrong here? On my antique Dell I would routinely have Vuze open downloading, firefox running up to 6 or 7 tabs, VLC playing music or video, Thunderbird and Calc with up to 2 spreadsheets, one of them has 2 sheets each with 3600 lines of data in them. That machine coped fine, if it wasn't for the lack of battery and dodgy power socket I'd much rather be using that. Any brand new machine, however badly designed, should be capable of outperforming something which came with 60Gb HDD and no more than 1Gb RAM. You are right, there is something wrong, having looked at the processor it should not have the problems you are describing. I run it on a 5 year old Intel T1350, 1.86GHz with 2GB RAM without such issues. Is it only when running FF you see performance issues? What difference, if any, do you think using 64 bit would make? None worth talking about. Colin -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
Re: [ubuntu-uk] Poor performance with Ubuntu on my laptop
On 4 October 2012 16:12, Tyler J. Wagner ty...@tolaris.com wrote: On 2012-10-04 16:05, Liam Proven wrote: On 4 October 2012 15:54, Gareth France gareth.fra...@gmail.com wrote: Both have the Pentium P6200 processor. Unfortunately, Intel is rather addicted to selling cheap, crippled CPUs which have been hobbled to fit a low price point by disabling most of their onboard cache memory. This dramatically reduces performance. Wow. Checking on that CPU, I can't believe it is still being sold: http://ark.intel.com/products/50176/Intel-Pentium-Processor-P6200-3M-Cache-2_13-GHz It doesn't even have VT-x! I'm sorry, Gareth, but I have no suggestions for you. Consider using Gnome 2 or XFCE. In my 2006 vintage desktop I only have one of these http://ark.intel.com/products/27511/Intel-Pentium-D-Processor-805-2M-Cache-2_66-GHz-533-MHz-FSB with 2GB memory and integrated ATI Radeon Express 200 graphics and it does run Unity 3D Ok, but AV performance has always been a bit poor. Tony -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
Re: [ubuntu-uk] Poor performance with Ubuntu on my laptop
On 4 October 2012 17:04, Tony Pursell a...@princeswalk.fsnet.co.uk wrote: On 4 October 2012 16:12, Tyler J. Wagner ty...@tolaris.com wrote: On 2012-10-04 16:05, Liam Proven wrote: On 4 October 2012 15:54, Gareth France gareth.fra...@gmail.com wrote: Both have the Pentium P6200 processor. Unfortunately, Intel is rather addicted to selling cheap, crippled CPUs which have been hobbled to fit a low price point by disabling most of their onboard cache memory. This dramatically reduces performance. Wow. Checking on that CPU, I can't believe it is still being sold: http://ark.intel.com/products/50176/Intel-Pentium-Processor-P6200-3M-Cache-2_13-GHz It doesn't even have VT-x! I'm sorry, Gareth, but I have no suggestions for you. Consider using Gnome 2 or XFCE. In my 2006 vintage desktop I only have one of these http://ark.intel.com/products/27511/Intel-Pentium-D-Processor-805-2M-Cache-2_66-GHz-533-MHz-FSB with 2GB memory and integrated ATI Radeon Express 200 graphics and it does run Unity 3D Ok, but AV performance has always been a bit poor. Surely browsing whilst playing music is ok though. Almost anything should be able to cope with that. Colin -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
Re: [ubuntu-uk] Poor performance with Ubuntu on my laptop
On 4 October 2012 15:54, Gareth France gareth.fra...@gmail.com wrote: I was thrilled when I recently got a brand new laptop for the 2nd time in my life. It's a budget model but I figured with 4Gb DDR3 and a 500Gb HDD it was a massive improvement over my ageing dell which had only a 60Gb drive. The new machine was a catalogue purchase where they listed it as simply having a Pentium processor. I joked at the time that this either means they were too lazy to type i3 or that it comes with a processor from 1995! It is a Packard Bell EasyNote TK85. Little did I know how right I was! The performance is a joke! Playing music in Banshee while browsing web pages leads to light skipping. Using certain sites firefox greys out and freezes every 30 seconds or so! It's just not coping. I never ran Windows on it, wiping the drive before it completed the first boot was extremely satisfying, however having realised a friend's Acer 5733z is literally identical, all bar cosmetic changes to the trackpad, power button etc, it got me thinking. They haven't complained about anything on their machine. Both have the Pentium P6200 processor. I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 32 bit on there at the moment. I was wondering if someone could suggest a distro which is less podgy to install and see if that works any better. What might be possible is that there's some kind of clock management going on that processor that works in Windows but not in Linux. I've had machines like that in the past and especially with the i3 there are a number of desktop and mobile variants and without looking, you may have a low end laptop variant. Looking at /proc/cpuinfo or System Monitor will give you an idea of what it thinks it is. Overclocking it might work but I'm sure you can do better even for their price. I do have to say that, as nice as some of their machines look, Packard Bell is a budget line and as was said many years ago, the name evokes two classic American names while having none of their quality. -- Twitter: @sfgreenwood TBA are particularly glib -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
Re: [ubuntu-uk] Poor performance with Ubuntu on my laptop
On 4 October 2012 17:07, Colin Law clan...@googlemail.com wrote: On 4 October 2012 17:04, Tony Pursell a...@princeswalk.fsnet.co.uk wrote: On 4 October 2012 16:12, Tyler J. Wagner ty...@tolaris.com wrote: On 2012-10-04 16:05, Liam Proven wrote: On 4 October 2012 15:54, Gareth France gareth.fra...@gmail.com wrote: Both have the Pentium P6200 processor. Unfortunately, Intel is rather addicted to selling cheap, crippled CPUs which have been hobbled to fit a low price point by disabling most of their onboard cache memory. This dramatically reduces performance. Wow. Checking on that CPU, I can't believe it is still being sold: http://ark.intel.com/products/50176/Intel-Pentium-Processor-P6200-3M-Cache-2_13-GHz It doesn't even have VT-x! I'm sorry, Gareth, but I have no suggestions for you. Consider using Gnome 2 or XFCE. In my 2006 vintage desktop I only have one of these http://ark.intel.com/products/27511/Intel-Pentium-D-Processor-805-2M-Cache-2_66-GHz-533-MHz-FSB with 2GB memory and integrated ATI Radeon Express 200 graphics and it does run Unity 3D Ok, but AV performance has always been a bit poor. Surely browsing whilst playing music is ok though. Almost anything should be able to cope with that. I don't listen to a lot of music, but you are right, music plays OK, even with my FF having at least 20 tabs! But video is poor in Ubuntu using VLC. It was OK in Widows last time I tried using the movie player that came with it. Tony -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
Re: [ubuntu-uk] Poor performance with Ubuntu on my laptop
On 04/10/12 16:49, Tony Pursell wrote: Hi Gareth You don't say how long ago you bought it or exactly how you bought it, but you may be able to cancel your order and return it under distance selling regulations, see http://www.adviceguide.org.uk/england/consumer_e/does_the_distance_sale_cooling-off_period_apply_to_you.htm Even if you cannot take advantage of this, it is worth others noting that you can get this right to return something you just don't like provided you decide quickly enough Tony It's damaged now and everything on the drive is just where I want it. I'm stuck with it. But I'm sure it should and can run better than this. -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
Re: [ubuntu-uk] Poor performance with Ubuntu on my laptop
On 04/10/12 16:58, Alan Bell wrote: Bring it along to the release party on the 18th and we can have a poke at it. I would try Quantal 64bit on it personally, There have been quite a lot of performance improvements and things have been largely unbroken with Unity in general. Alan. I was hoping to come along actually. And now I have a hard drive bigger than a postage stamp it's finally possible to try dual booting so I'll give that a go. -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
Re: [ubuntu-uk] Poor performance with Ubuntu on my laptop
On 04/10/12 17:02, Colin Law wrote: On 4 October 2012 16:43, Gareth France gareth.fra...@gmail.com wrote: Try chromium browser to see if that is better. FF can be processor hungry. Choosing the right apps may be more important than the distribution. sudo apt-get install chromium-browser Colin As much as I appreciate what you're saying don't you think something is very wrong here? On my antique Dell I would routinely have Vuze open downloading, firefox running up to 6 or 7 tabs, VLC playing music or video, Thunderbird and Calc with up to 2 spreadsheets, one of them has 2 sheets each with 3600 lines of data in them. That machine coped fine, if it wasn't for the lack of battery and dodgy power socket I'd much rather be using that. Any brand new machine, however badly designed, should be capable of outperforming something which came with 60Gb HDD and no more than 1Gb RAM. You are right, there is something wrong, having looked at the processor it should not have the problems you are describing. I run it on a 5 year old Intel T1350, 1.86GHz with 2GB RAM without such issues. Is it only when running FF you see performance issues? What difference, if any, do you think using 64 bit would make? None worth talking about. Colin I haven't tried another browser. When I get off this tonka toy 3G connection I'll download a few others and try. -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
