Just a point on "mounting". In Windows you don't have to know about this because disks in Windows formats are automatically accessible and non-Windows disks are treated as non-existent.

In Linux, disks in many formats (including Windows FAT32 and NTFS) are accessible, but you have to mount them first. Mounting a disk simply means associating it with a directory (preferably an empty one) by using the mount command. The directory or mount-point then becomes an alias for the root directory of the disk. This means that all currently mounted disks form a single tree. It's not like in Windows, where each disk filesystem is an island, meaning you have to know what disk something is on to find it.

In your /etc directory, you will find a file called fstab. This is a list of disks known to the system. Most are mounted automatically at boot. You will notice that CDs and such-like have the option noauto set. The system will not attempt to mount them at boot; you have to mount them by hand. Disks not in this table can still be mounted, but only by root, and you need to give the mount command full details.

All disk maintenance must be carried out on unmounted disks. Otherwise you risk severe corruption.

man mount will give you more info.

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Thank you Hazel for explaining that. I get the general idea, but looking at the man mount command, it looks quite involved.

To quote a judge, who after having some technical details explained to him, said. "I am none the wiser", to which the barrister instantly replied, "Yes, but you are much better informed, my lord."

It's not as bad as it looks! Only the first group of options really matter. They are the main options to the command itself. The subsequent groups are specialised options that apply only to certain filesystems. And if you look at the main options, they mostly go in pairs setting something on or off. One of the pair will be the default, so you only need to use an option if you want the non-default setting.

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Regarding post #11, that's outrageous Firefox CPU usage. Which add-ons are you using?

To run Firefox without add-ons (and see if that reduces the CPU usage somewhat), in Firefox: Help->Troubleshooting Information->Restart with Add-Ons Disabled.

Also, re: qbittorrent, are you seeding anything?

Is the storage device > 80% full?

Is the ps output super long? A lot of things run by default in linux so if you install something it's probably running "something", even if you are not using it (at the moment). You can gain a few resources and speed by stopping cups (printing), and other things. Doing a fresh install so less things are installed can help too. Browsers are also getting more bloated, if you have 2GB or less RAM, you're probably using the storage device a lot.

You could have also gotten an update that otherwise disabled your GPU support. Which would be noticeable.

$ glxinfo | grep -i direct

Changing swappiness can help. The default is 60, but 20 is snappier if you have enough RAM to not need to swap much.

$ cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
# echo 20 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

If you're using an external display from a laptop, you can get a small boost by turning off the laptops LCD.

$ xrandr --output eDP --off

Otherwise some storage optimizations for older installations.

# updatedb
# ldconfig

As previously mentioned. Defragging wont do much unless you're > 50% usage. And even then in linux you gain maybe a 5% boost, versus 100+% boost back in the win95 days. If defragging is a concern, I just rsync the install to a fresh filesystem and boot the "other" storage device. With caveats of updating /etc/fstab and the bootloader to know it's new location.

Hello again hydrurga,

Now is the time to say that after I made the first post in this thread under Windows because of Mint being unusably slow, since running Mint again it is now a lot better at present, even allowing for the very high CPU usage in those reports.

I don’t know what has happened, but I have rebooted four or five times over the past week (powered off and on again), but didn’t it make the system speed up at all, until this last time. It is completely weird.

What I did before was to reboot Mint and only run one program at a time, but each one was still really, really slow.

When I saw the top.txt figures, the first thing that went through my mind was, “It must be a good trick if you can do it.” Firefox and qbittorrent make a total of 113%. How can anything use more than 100%?
The memory doesn’t seem to be a problem, but I do have 12Gb RAM anyway.

See the attached pics of all my Addons, I’m still running Firefox normally right now.
Regarding qbittorrent, I have only seven torrents in total, and two/three of those are sometimes seeding.

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My Linux partition seems to show as only 20% full.

It's interesting you mention about an update and GPU support. Perhaps I have, unfortunately I have no idea what GPU support is.
On my laptop I'm only using the laptop display, nothing else.

The numbers produced by top are non-normalised - if you have 8 CPUs/cores you could theoretically see up to 800% for example. Maybe even slightly more with rounding errors.

Firefox is a pig - I regularly have to cancel it. 'nuff said.

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That's more than enough memory and those add-ons look fine. I'd keep on top of the seeding though - if you're experiencing a slow system then it would be best for you not to seed until you have the problem sorted out.

Have an occasional look in /var/log/syslog, especially after you've finished booting up if you say that the boot process is slow, to see if you're getting any unusual warnings/errors. Perhaps you're getting intermittent hardware errors from somewhere and the slowness is due to having to re-poll the device.

Also, have a look through your startup programs in the system preferences and see if you can disable any of them. I, for example, disable the following in Mint MATE:

AT SPI D-Bus Bus (accessibility)
blueberry (bluetooth)
Desktop sharing
MATE Panel Compiz (I use Marco + compositing)
mintupload
mintwelcome
Orca Screen Reader
Screensaver (I don't use)
Support for NVIDIA Prime (I don't have Nvidia)
User Folders Update (since I’m using English anyway)

Have you have enabled the firewall?

Thanks for explaining that. I have a quad core, so I can get up to 400% then?

Yep - not likely to happen, but don't be surprised to see 160%+ say numbers.
Just remember why.

err, firewall? Is that a Mint firewall? I have no idea.
These are the items I have in startup. I tend to leave Alarm Clock running as it is a useful timer for everyday use.
(edit) What's Ctrl Alt Backspace for?

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The firewall is called iptables. I think all Linux distros use it. That's true of most of your software btw. Very little of it is Mint-specific.
It kills X. What happens next depends on whether you logged in graphically or launched your desktop with startx. In the former case, X will restart and present you with a new login screen. In the latter, you find yourself back in the console from which you started X.

ctrl-alt-backspace doesn't always work. Some desktops disable it.

Run gufw (it should also be somewhere in the Cinnamon program launcher) and change the status to On to ensure the firewall is switched on.

Re: startup applications, if you don't use Mint Upload or the Mint Welcome screen then you can disable these. Same for NVIDIA if you don't have a NVIDIA graphics card. Personally I wouldn't run qBittorrent at startup (I still think it could well be a contributory factor to this problem), I would launch it manually when required.

I'm sorry, but I have no idea what any of that means? You'll have to use very basic English with this, iptables, startx, the only X I know is regarding algebra.