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Would installing make the computer faster?

Ask Ubuntu Asked by Mark kurti on December 17, 2021

I have two laptops, an old one and another that’s about 2-3-years-old. They are for my father. We bought the second one because the old one was slow, now they are both slow (the second one is functional but slow)

My father uses word and facebook (he writes and shares his righting a lot) and a bit of youtube, that’s all he knows how to do

To solve the slowness problem I thought to install ubuntu. So I tried installing it on the old laptop. I chose the option of removing windows completely, and I managed to install it with no problem (it does give me an error when I install apps, something like '/data/' folder does not exist).

But it’s still extremely slow, I tried to open libereoffic and it just takes ages to load.

This is on the first old computer

Is it me, have I installed it wrong, is it the computer?

I’m scared to do the same thing to the second laptop as it would mean I would have to re-install windows and so on and I hate doing this (especially when it’s not for myself)

Do you have any tips?

I chose to remove windows instead of running parallel because I should it would give ubuntu more breathing room, would it be a good idea to install ubuntu on the second laptop in parallel or …

(I later found that I should have checked whether my laptop is 32-bit or 64-bit, I didn’t, is there a way to do it now and reinstall ubuntu again, or could it definitely be the laptop’s fault for being too old)

(sorry for not being technical enough)

One Answer

I am using old laptops with Linux for a long time. It works really good. Here some ideas I've gathered over the years:

  • Do not use Gnome (this is the desktop environment), such as Ubuntu. I would suggest Xubuntu, which has a XFCE Desktop which has matured over the years.
  • If your laptop has a NVIDIA card - use the proprietary drivers. (See here for how to install it).
  • Make sure you have a swap partition, especially if your laptop runs on a hardisk.
    Explanation: If you run out of Memory Linux (and windows) will copy part of your memory unto your disk. That is called swapping. Lately some Linux distros (such as Ubuntu) setup files (like pagefile.sys) instead of a dedicated swap partion on the disk. I'd recommend the latter.(This is finetuning, if you don't know how to setup a swap partion, don't. You can do it any time later -just ask a new question)
  • If possible get 4-8 GB RAM - the more memory you've got, the better.

Linux will not be fast on certain drivers - Old AMD GPUs are not be supported very well - no matter which Ubuntu flavour you have.

You could install XFCE besides Gnome, but in my experience the best way would be to make a clean install with Xubuntu.

Answered by kanehekili on December 17, 2021

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