Dual / Multi Core Processor support?

[Timmi]

I just put Mint13cinammon 64bit onto my laptop, that was running, up until now, Windoze7

Now, it slows down to a crawl when doing a couple tasks at the same time.

For example, when copying large quantities of files, I can't do much else... my browser slows down to a crawl, sometimes even freezing for a while.
Doing the same in Windoze7 did not give me this problem - I could just keep on working while this stuff went on just fine.

I have an Acer laptop, dual core i3, P6200, with 4GB of RAM.
Mint partition is about 400GB, mostly unused, and it boots directly into Mint (do not run it through Windoze).

Is it possible that Mint 13 runs only singlecore?

[abnvolk]

Mint certainly support dual core - my laptop is Core 2 Duo.
You may take a look at System Monitor to see which apps are using much memory.

[nunol]

That's probably not a CPU or RAM problem but you can use top or htop to find out what is slowing down the computer and use nice to give less priority to that process and see if that helps. Another tool you can use is ionice. Also check the swap utilization and if everything is OK in the BIOS. If you are running the 32bit version of Mint try the 64bit version. If you are running the KDE, Cinnamon or MATE desktop try to install LXDE on top and use that to see if it's faster.

The Linux kernel it's probably more tuned to server loads than to desktop use, anything that uses the disk a lot slows down the computer including updates, installations and copying files. Some distros come out of the box with several kernel modifications to improve responsiveness like SolusOS with BFS and preempt. Try SolusOS to see if the same happens or solves the problem.

[Timmi]

Mint certainly support dual core - my laptop is Core 2 Duo. You may take a look at System Monitor to see which apps are using much memory.

Thanks for the suggestion, but my concern is not what app is taking up processing power. My concern is, that when I'm copying files in Win7 I can keep on doing my usual stuff in Chrome. In this version, my computer slows down to a crawl. I doubt that I need to run a program to figure out what is taking processing power - it's file copying. We already know that from the first post. What I don't understand is why it isn't exploiting the 2 cores very well (if it is in fact using both).

[Timmi]

The Linux kernel it's probably more tuned to server loads than to desktop use, anything that uses the disk a lot slows down the computer including updates, installations and copying files. Some distros come out of the box with several kernel modifications to improve responsiveness like SolusOS with BFS and preempt. Try SolusOS to see if the same happens or solves the problem.

I've corrected my first post, adding that it's 64bit.
I won't be trying a different distro. It's Mint, or Windoze, for me. I've tried enough of them over the years that I'm tired of tinkering and frustrations.

This is a fresh install. And the ONLY apps I launched was Files, to start backing up data by just copying it from one partition to another, and browsing in Firefox. That's it! I didn't even have a messenger running.

[rhodry]

What kernel are you running? Post the output of these terminal commands:

$ uname -r

$ inxi -SGxc 0 (that's a zero not oh)

rhodry.