I used to have Fedora Core 8 on this laptop. I switched to Ubuntu, and my laptop is much slower now. I'm wondering if I can fix this with my video driver configuration, bios settings, or kernel parameters. Any ideas?

What are your computer's specifications? Most importantly, memory.

If you have an older laptop (3 yrs or so) you'd have as much issue running fedora 10 on it as ubuntu... or debian lenny, for that matter. If you're interested in more up to date software that's still resource friendly, we can investigate some options.

I've found that editing startup sessions will help... System > Preferences > Sessions or (Application Startup). Uncheck everything thats not needed (e.g. gnome sound, gnome splash, assistance, etc.). Also you can install Boot up Manager, and edit run levels.

Also there's a kernel parameter trick that isn't used. And should only used once in awhile for disk performance. Startup, and when you see the Grub screen, highlight your Ubuntu entry. Then hit the "e" key. Scroll to where it says "kernel", then hit the "e" again and put the word "profile" at the end of the kernel string, then press enter and then "b". It will startup unusably slow... This is OK, and is normal. Wait till all disk activity has finished after loading X. Then reboot and enter Ubuntu normally. Try disabling acpi, and check Ubuntu site for additional parameters.

As for the Vid card, I'd lspci and google the card with X and Ubuntu, and then check for any configuration tricks, or bugs.

Also If your daring, try the new 9.04 Juanty, with ext4. This should speed up boot times considerably. And its only weeks away from being released.

I've found that my system starts much faster with with custom distro's, such as Arch and Gentoo. So there an option if Ubuntu is not for you.

Hi! Thank you so much for the ideas. I'm familiar with "noapic," so I'm trying to that one now. So far, my laptop seems to be doing about the same. We'll see as time goes on and I push it farther. Would you mind explaining the "profile" parameter? What exactly does it do?

My laptop is an HP Pavilion dv6113us with 1 GB memory and two AMD 64 bit 800 Mhz processors. I believe that's about an AMD 1200+?

Meh, Not the same. But one gig /is/ generally enough- But to compare, I tried ubuntu on a one gig machine (1.7 intel) when it was...8.4 or something and it was slow as well. Straight Debian, however, works swimmingly, but sometimes firefox takes a little to load. On that same machine I tried damn small linux, puppy linux and PCLinuxOS and a port of that, TinyMe. My favorite was actually PCLinuxOS, but DSL ran the best.

By all means, play with the parameters and video and such- try to tweak your ubuntu, then if/when you have success, please post it here. If you don't, then I would try either straight debian, DSL, or PCLinuxOS.