Ubuntu 12.04 x64 - Very slow response and sluggishness

Recently updated to 12.04 (64-bit) on my AMD hex-core 4GB system, over the last few days I feel that the overall system is sluggish/laggy, for instance hitting the dash button, the dash opens but the recent activity of files/videos etc is incredibly slow to populate, like wise in Nautilus and browsing my media, the file names are showing up but it takes an age to populate the "thumb" of the video, If I go into Gnome-shell the shell response is a little faster but again clicking on applications there is still a noticeable pause.

I have the latest Nvidia drivers loaded and I have very fast SATA drives, if I reboot into windows 7 the system is so much quicker in its response, I only use windows for games and Ubuntu is my main OS.

10.04/10.10/11.04 was super quick and this was when the system still had a dual-core Chip and a worse Nvidia card, 11.10 was pretty snappy, but 12.04 just feels bloated on each system I have installed it on. My hardware is more than up to the task so has anyone got any commands i can run to help diagnose the issue?

Anyone else got the same problems?

I had similar issue after upgrading my 10.04 to a 12.04 when running in gnome-classic (didn't get time to experience gnome-shell or unity yet)

• laptop with i7 cpu, 8G of ram, nvidia 880M, so a pretty good configuration

• using compiz but most of effects are disabled (yet, the Expo plugin is a must for me)

• normal windows operations are very slow, especially swapping from one window to another, or switching desktop

• things gets even worse with the number of windows opened

I tested lot of things :

• upgrading nvidia drivers to 304.43 thanks to the "xorg-edgers" PPA ==> Better results but finally it just need more time to get the same slow down.
• disabling most "sync to vblank" ==> no particular improvements

Finally, I disabled the Compiz "Place windows" pluggins, and every things start to be fast again !

I didn't check more, but there are definitely something wrongs with Compiz and Gnome3.4. Hopefully, it looks like only restricted to some pluggins.

Since today (at least for me). In the Ubuntu 32 bit and 64 bit version of 12.04, updating to the latest Nvidia 295.49 fixed all lag problems.

Confirmed on both 32/64 after restarting and toying around with several windows and wine apps. Everything feels correct again.

Here is the launchpad information about it.

But I can add to it that it should also include the 9500 GT, 220 GT and 440 GT. All of them were also suffering from the same problem but now is gone.

Problems like the following which I was having are gone:

• Moving the mouse in any window
• Moving a Window
• Opening a folder in Nautilus (Or even going back to a previous folder)
• Wine Games
• Ubuntu Games
• Slow LibreOffice, Banshee or Rhythmbox
• Weird artifacts when starting Ubuntu (Including missing panels or loading without them)