I consider myself as a newbie even if I run Linux on a few other machines.

My acer 522 BZ-499 was showing bad sectors so I decided to replace the HDD. Did it then Loaded Ubuntu 13, it was a bit sluggish so I moved down to 12.04.3 LTS for it was written that it was ok for machine with less than 2 g RAM , I still find it sluggish, 30 seconds to boot to the UBUNTU logo and another 30 seconds to boot to the desktop.

Is that normal or should I expect better with 12.04 ?

I would appreciate a suggestion as to what could be the best distro for that Acer. Thank you very much - Have a good day

mostly ram is consumed by desktop environment. I would recommend you install latest ubuntu and smallest desktop like xfce, openbox, etc..

Ubuntu: How to reduce Memory usage

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Thank you, maybe I am only daydreaming !

At first I would recommend to install the proprietary video driver from AMD, the kernels used by current Ubuntu versions are not new enough to support setting the correct clockspeed for the videochip, which usually means that it runs with the lowest possible speed. That can indeed cause sluggishness on the rather demanding Unity desktop. Of course using a more lightweight environment will also help to further speed up the system.

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