Why is software slow to install using Ubuntu Software Center?

I've recently installed 12.04 on my PC but I am finding that it takes an eternity to install software using the software center. My PC has more than enough power to handle this (I'm running a 64 bit machine), so it's not a hardware issue. I've seen a similar thread to this but no clear answer on how to remedy the problem was given. It took me 30 minutes to install a game I downloaded, this was on top of the download time, and my PC was effectively unusable during this period. Other software I've downloaded (Skype, Wine etc) were slow to install. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Solution 1:

Although this might be a dodgy answer (as in "do it this way instead"), I've always found it a lot easier to install and update from the terminal. You can even tab complete the names of the packages you're looking for, in case you're not entirely sure what they're called. Installing VLC is as simple as:

sudo apt-get install vlc

When you want to look for updates, you'll simply write

sudo apt-get update

To get the new lists of packets, and then do

sudo apt-get upgrade

To perform the actual upgrade.

Another advantage of the terminal is that you actually see what's going on all the time, it tends to be a bit more obscured in the software center, which might give the impression that it's hung when it's actually just installing a lot of packages.