I can confirm the same behaviour in Dapper on Dell Latitude C840, P4 2.4, Intel 845 chipset and Fujitsu MHT2060AT hard disk.
Hard disk access subsystem is very slow with both -386 and -686 kernels. `hdparm -tT /dev/hda` reports 3MB/s on average (DMA is on), but fluctuates quite a bit, down to hundreds of kilobytes/s. The same laptop performs well with Debian (Linux 2.6.8) and Knoppix (Linux 2.6.12), i.e. hdparm reports 25MB/s consistently with DMA on. -- All applications are slow to launch on Dapper https://launchpad.net/bugs/52719 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
