Please forgive me if the question has been posted elsewhere. Seriously, I've been searching for an answer to this issue for the last 2 hours.

When I scroll through windows, i.e. nautilus, the contents do not scroll a few pixels at a time, but lines at a time. "In steps" i think is the correct term. When scrolling through a lengthy directory or list using the scroll wheel, it looks very choppy and is hard to follow until i stop scrolling. There seems to be no visible option to change this behavior in any of the obvious locations unless I have simply overlooked them:

CompizConfig Settings manager
Gnome Tweak tool
System settings
dconf editor

I have also tried gpointing-devices to no avail. Using the scroll bar results in smooth(er) scrolling but there is still what appears to be some aliasing going on.

I am using Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
Gnome shell
Compiz
Dell Latitude D420
Logitech Mx 310 USB wired mouse

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated

What is your video card?

Ubuntu tends to run best on faster modern hardware with dedicated graphics cards.

I have an intel integrated graphics chip. :/

I don't have Ubuntu running right now, but I suggest checking in your control center for the mouse wheel scroll settings. Most systems seem to have the default scroll for the mouse wheel set the three lines.

You can try something like Xfce desktop if you like:

http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/xfce

That looks quite nifty, but how does one go about replacing Gnome with Xfce? Or can I leave it along side Gnome?

You can just leave XFCE along side Gnome and choose your desired desktop using the session chooser on the login screen before you log in. You can, in fact, have as many desktops/windows managers installed as you can fit on your hard drive.

I see. Well, I will give it a go and see if this clears the issue. I will report the results. Please stand by

Sorry for the long delay, but installing xfce seemed to be the best answer. I gues Gnome is too beefy for my aging laptop

Thanks for the update.