IBM T42 "Extremely, EXTREMELY Slow"
 

Just bought an "off lease" Thinkpad T42; Ubuntu Jaunty installed; 1 gig ram.

It is so slow that when I finish typing a paragraph, it takes the system 10 or 15 seconds to finish displaying text on the screen (I only type about 50 wpm).

So, I removed 512 of ram, and it helped, but Only a Little.

I then did a clean install of Kubuntu 9: No Change!

This Thinkpad is an upgrade to a PII with 256 ram and RH 8.0 which smoked!

Why is my new Laptop SO PAINFULLY SLOOOOOOOOOW???

Any suggestions for the cause would be So Appreciated!

Thanks much,

Michelle

p.s. - I am hoping that I don't have to donate it to charity :(

Is it possibly a problem with Ubuntu? Have you tried any other distribution? Are you sure the RAM you're using is working correctly? Is there possibly a problem with the hard drive?

Try downloading some lightweight live distribution like Slax or Damn Small Linux and see whether that works for you. If not, have the hardware checked.

-A

I'd leave the ram there. Check the logs for errors. Put the next line in a terminal
grep -i error /var/log/messages

also check for a swap partition. If your box is 64 bit, get another 1 gig at least of memory
'free' is the command that tells you your memory usage. There may also be driver issues. Try

sudo hdparm -tT /dev/sda and tell us what it says. Here's my output:
/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 2094 MB in 2.00 seconds = 1047.51 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 186 MB in 3.01 seconds = 61.70 MB/sec

The 61.79 MB/sec is the figure.

no error log output, but the second:

/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 1198 MB in 2.00 seconds = 598.50 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 90 MB in 3.05 seconds = 29.54 MB/sec

what do I do next, please?

Have you cleaned the CPU fan? My daughter had been complaining about her Mac mini being slow so I bought her more memory and went ahead and got a larger drive while I was at it. When I got it apart, the CPU cooling "system" was just clogged with dust and grunge. I credit cleaning that out with the major part of her speedup. You might check to see if CPU throttling is in effect.

I'm guessing that T42 is about 5 years old and 32 bit. 29 MB/S is slowish, but OK.
The likely things to slow it are: Slow disks (More or less eliminated); Poor choice of drivers; Low cpu speeds due to overtemp or some other setting; Massive video issues, This is by no means an all inclusive list.

Are you using a compressed disk or running off a CD?
Can you check your cpu temperature? over 70 degrees kills action.
You might run memtest86 on it? http://www.memtest86.org
You might take a look in /var/log/Xorg.0.log for video hassle (Falling back to ...)
Let us know how you get on.
Then Post the output of 'cat /etc/mtab'