My wife's laptop is a Compaq Evo N610c. She got tired of Windows and simultaneously became impressed with my KDE 4 desktop, so she asked me to convert her over to Linux. I was thrilled.

Just to start out, I installed Slackware-current on her machine. Overall, she liked it, but she got annoyed with using the CLI so much. I figured that she might have more fun with Ubuntu.

So, I downloaded and installed Kubuntu 9.04 on her machine. It installed well (The Ubuntu installer is pretty nice . . . but then, you guys know that.), but once it came up it was running at a snail's pace. I mean, we're talking 386DX running Windows 95 kind of slow . . . like mouse pointer is choppy even with nothing running kind of slow.

I checked to see what procs were running, and there wasn't a lot going on . . . I had just hald, syslogd, and the standard kde junk, and that's it.

What's wierd to me here is that, under Slackware-current, with just about the exact same software running, the machine runs pretty quick under KDE 4. In fact, it runs with no slow-down with all of the compositing and eye candy turned on. I didn't even dare try that under Kubuntu because it was going so slowly just on bare-bones.

So I've got her back on Slackware with the default runlevel set to 4 (which is multi-user with X, like Kubuntu runs in by default), and she likes that pretty well.

The truth is, I'd rather have her on Kubuntu, but I couldn't figure out why it was crawling so badly.

What plagues me about this is that we're talking about the same exact programs running on the same exact machine with the same exact partitioning scheme. The only difference is a tiny kernel version difference (2.6.28 on Kubuntu vs 2.6.29 on Slackware-current) and KDE 4.3 vs KDE 4.2. That doesn't seem to me to be significant enough to cause all of the speed difference.

You guys know Ubuntu certainly far better than I . . . what did I miss? What would be unique to Kubuntu or Ubuntu in general that I might have missed or not known about that could have been causing that?

Thanks for any help I can get.

K/Ubuntu is known to be more resource intensive than many of the more "hardcore" distros like Slackware and Debian. See this comparison between Xubuntu and Debian with XFCE:
http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?is...ode=68#feature
I have installed both Debian and Ubuntu on 3 different desktops plus a laptop. On every system, Debian ran faster and used fewer resources than Ubuntu. I have noticed the same speed difference between Ubuntu and Slackware. The performance of Ubuntu has always been acceptable to me though. Also, Ubuntu is known to have become slower and more resource intensive as newer versions have added more things to make it more beginner friendly:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...nch_2008&num=1
A quick google search shows your laptop has ATI graphics. Did you try enabling the proprietary ATI driver? On Ubuntu, go to: system > administration > hardware drivers to enable it. (I'm not sure where this is on the Kubuntu menu).

There are things you can do to speed up Ubuntu... a bit. On Ubuntu, go to: system > preferences > startup applications (Again, I'm not sure where this is on the Kubuntu menu). You can uncheck things like:
"Check for new hardware" (I read that this is a bit of a resource hog; and nobody needs this running all the time anyways).
"Bluetooth" (assuming you don't need it).
"Update Notifier" (this will require checking for updates manually with apt-get or: system > administration > update manager).
"Visual Assistance", and anything else you may not need.
Also, you can install sysv-rc-conf and use that to disable any processes that you may not need. See this tutorial. It is a bit old, but still relevant:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=89491
Also, you may be interested in the Ubuntu minimal install CD. This will let you install a simple command line system. Then you can just apt-get only the stuff you need:
http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/minimal