breathing new life into old laptop ... kubuntu 8 very slow
 

Hi all,

My girlfriend's old lap is a 2.8ghz p4 w/ 384 MBs of RAM Toshiba.

I have a couple questions:

1. I loaded kubuntu 8 onto the thing ... am I asking to much? Should I go with a smaller windows manager? (For distros I'd like to stick to either ubuntu or fedora, so its easier to support her. I doubt this matters all that much, her computer isn't THAT old.)

2. I have a hardware problem. The CPU seems to sit around 90% usage. I saw the same problem when it was running XP. My first guess is that its a failing hard drive, but this is only a shot in the dark. I did a "tail -100 /var/log/dmesg" but didn't see any error messages.

How should I go about diagnosing this problem?

Thanks in advance,

Steve

Kubuntu should run fine on your laptop. I have it running on a couple of P3s with the same amount of ram and it's not bad.

What is using the CPU so much? Have you tried "top" to have a look? If you haven't, run top from the command line and see what is eating the CPU.

Report back.

Good luck

Ya, already looked @ top. when it peaks top itself is the process using 90% of the cpu. No other process seems to use an usually large amount of CPU. xorg is 2nd largest process and its using 2 to 4%

I seem to vaguely remember having a similar problem with one Kubuntu install ..... a little voice in my head is saying that the desktop search engine (Kat?) was causing the issue. Try removing it and see what happens. I am guessing here ......

If you have lots of disk activity (and it eventually settles down...I do mean eventually) something indexing the disk could be responsible.

Unfortunately there are quite a lot of things that this can be; the previous poster's suggestion, plus updatedb, beagle and quite a few others.