I have a Acer aspire 4720. I wish to use Linux as a Desktop. I have used Ubuntu 8.04 very successfully on it and was very happy with it. I ungraded to Ubunty 9.04 and found it to be too slow. The windows open and close with jerks. The booting time is enormous. The HDD light keeps on for very long and makes all sorts of sounds. Inspite of the fact that I have not been able to switch on the Visual Effects. First of all i could not start it but lated when i found it so slow i gave up the idea of taxing my laptop so much. Takes ages for Firefox to close. At times the response to clicks is also delayed. There is a gnome error every other boot. Over all a very very bad experience. Now I have a 9.10 CD with me but I am wondering if I should upgrade to 9.10 or degrade to 8.04 or switch over altogether to some other distro like Mint (or any other). I am just looking for a very stable, fast and very secure Linux for me. Easy to use but without much gimmicks (if it makes things slow). Plz advise.

Your swapping too much. How much RAM do you have?

I think i hav enuf ram - 2 gb

I have 2 gb of ram and a core 2 duo processor (1.5 + 1.5 GHz) and abt 40 gb of free HDD space.

is your swapping actually ON? can you turn it OFF and try?

How do we do that ?
I have abt 1 gb of swap partition.

Post:

What does that do ?
What is that code for ?
For turning the swapping On ? or Off ?

To find the swapspace, type
This should give something like
To disable swap
to enable swap

To find the processes actualy running
type

cat /etc/fstab
gives the following result :
swap was on /dev/sda6 during installation none swap sw 0 0

What do you want me to do after this ? Just disable and enable swap ?
Thats all ?

Top result is as follows :

top - 18:11:35 up 6 min, 2 users, load average: 0.68, 0.91, 0.44
Tasks: 143 total, 1 running, 141 sleeping, 0 stopped, 1 zombie
Cpu(s): 4.1%us, 2.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 93.6%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 2052624k total, 816656k used, 1235968k free, 23064k buffers
Swap: 1052216k total, 0k used, 1052216k free, 411160k cached

I simultaneously checked in the system monitor but it did not display anything using much CPU. The maximum that was being used was by Gnome system monitor but even that was not too much.

I personally feel there must be some drivers (intel) / xorg stuff that are not installed by default in 9.04 and because of that the system is not performing at an optimum level.

Nope, Ubuntu is just bloated, each version moreso than the last. 9.04 was approximately the same speed as Vista.

I know a lot of people are gonna get exited by that comment, but thats what I have observed from personal experience.

If I have to drift away from Ubuntu which distro will you suggest ?
Something, stable, fast, secure and with good repo !

Debian

I am in a fix Debian or Fedora or Mint ?
How is crunchbang ?

I would give ubuntu another chance 9.10 is at least twice as fast booting than 9.04. I believe without checking crunchbang is ubuntu based.your p.c should run ubuntu pretty fast with half the ram you've got,any how there are a lot of linux distro's I hope you have a lot of fun as I have trying as many out as I have,but I still find my way back to ubuntu lol good luck happy hunting.

Well, I was happy with 8.04 but ever since I have switched over to 9.04 its a horrible experience.
I am more bothered abt my HDD making those noises and being over taxed than anything else.

I dont like to keep changing my OS every now and then. Because I have to make a lot of configurations and install a lot of packages to make the system running as per my needs but then in a month's time if i realize that the new OS is crap and i need to change, means a loss of a lot of time.