Optimising 11.04 for speed

I've just upgraded to 11.04 (after 10.04) on my laptop. This went without a glitch, everything just works, so kudos to the Ubuntu team. But my laptop is old in dog years. It's a more than 5 year old travelmate 2420 and when I bought it it wasn't the latest and greatest model...

Now, I'm experiencing a desperately slow computer. Boot time is way up, and running any program is also much slower than before. I'm guessing this is because of the graphical effects of Unity. Is there a way to make Ubuntu 11.04 more snappy?

Edit: 487.1MiB RAM, Intel Celeron M processor 1.60GHz

Solution 1:

You can try to use Unity-2D instead of Unity-3D, Unity-2D is an good option, to enable it use this guide if that is not something you would like to do you can try to just disable compiz using ccsm and see if that speeds up things.

Ubuntu 11.10 is not known for its start up speed (at least until the current beta release) so don't be surprised over that.

You can try to follow some optimization guides on the internet on how to make 11.04 faster (most of the information will still be valid for 11.10), those bring some improvement but its up to you to decide if it is enough or not.

Your laptop is a bit old for top of the notch software in my opinion, Ubuntu and Unity require a bit more resources than other simple UIs. Maybe a better option for you would be to use a less resource needy Ubuntu based flavour like Xubuntu. Have a look, maybe it will fit your needs better.

Gl, hf ;)