Hello from Canada

[tristam]

I am a Math/Comp Sci teacher who has a volunteer project going on at MIT. I am trying out Mint 13 on a laptop through a thumb drive. Results are good but sluggish. I am looking for ways of speeding things up from within Mint.

[The-Wizard]

it's always slower through an external drive, but probably the best way to test.

Welcome to the Mint family forums

wizard

[xenopeek]

Hi tristam, welcome to the Linux Mint forums Thanks for joining the forums! Linux Mint run from a thumb drive will be noticeably slower than when run from a hard disk. To speed it up you can disable some automatically started services, though it depends on your system how much of a difference that will make. See some tips here: viewtopic.php?t=106417&f=18#p600177. To measure objectively if your changes are actually an improvement, you can install bootchart. See here: viewtopic.php?f=46&t=110396&p=619427#p619347.

Be sure also to check out the Community website (tutorials, hardware and software reviews, ideas), and the Cinnamon Spices website for adding even more themes, applets and extensions to Cinnamon.

You can also chat in real-time with other Linux Mint users. In the Mint Menu, in the Internet section, start the application XChat IRC. You will automatically get connected to #linuxmint-chat for general chat and #linuxmint-help for support with other Linux Mint users.

Have fun with Linux Mint.

[tristam]

Great suggestions! Thanks!