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I bought a computer in 2007. It has 2 GB RAM. 2x1.46GHZ. But for some reason it is very laggy.

I want to install an operating system which will work as fast as possible.

What I want to do:

  • JAVA (Eclipse, netbeans)
  • OpenOffice, Libreoffice or similiar.
  • PDF as well.
  • Films, Music.
  • NO GAMES, NO GAMES, NO GAMES.
  • Internet(Firefox or chrome)
  • Some way of using SSH, SFTP, FTP.
  • Programs for DB management like SQliteman or MysqlWorkbench or PGAdmin.

Currently I have the latest version of Ubuntu with Unity installed, but sometimes it is so laggy.

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  • What OS are you running now and what OSs are you familiar with ?
    – Shekhar
    Nov 18, 2011 at 14:09
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    Is anything seriously preventing you from using XP? I expect you could do what you want (although JAVA dev with 2GB of RAM is probably a bad idea).
    – tombull89
    Nov 18, 2011 at 14:33
  • Could also be a hardware issue. My SSD fried not long ago and I had to reinstall XP on a 5400RPM drive. You've never seen anything lag like my setup! Still, XP is rock solid -- and I've tried almost every desktop OS. Good luck!
    – Jeff
    Nov 18, 2011 at 15:20
  • Um, you are aware that Ubuntu comes with a whole bundle of games in the official repos, right...?
    – user
    Nov 18, 2011 at 15:44
  • I have winXP on my wifes computer, ubuntu on my computer, macos lion on my wjob computer. And well linux debian 6 on VPS.
    – Jevgeni Smirnov
    Nov 20, 2011 at 6:27

2 Answers 2

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You really want to just change window manager no need to completely reinstall with a new os.

As the reply suggest you could try XFCE you can just do a

apt-get install XFCE4

restart your X and probably have it as an option there are 100s of window managers these days so if that does suite its worth having a look around. The advantage will be less memory and CPU usage but with less functionality that you may not require.

see here :- http://xwinman.org/

I would argue that you would get better performance from steering away from full blown desktops but it really depends on how happy you are at the unix prompt

Simon

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  • I would argue that it's probably pretty difficult to run OpenOffice or derivates on the command line. A light-weight WM such as Xfce4 should make a big difference, though. That, and taking a look at just what is eating CPU and seeing if you can't disable that separately.
    – user
    Nov 18, 2011 at 15:43
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Try Xubuntu with XFCE if Unity is too slow. I think you should be able to install XFCE without re-installing the whole system. Also learn what is working slow in your system (check what htop shows).

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