Mint 12 and high CPU usage?

[tealflame]

I installed Mint 12 x64 along side Windows 7 x64. It seems sluggish so I installed the latest ATI drivers. Now its a little quicker but I notice that all desktop environments with Gnome3 or cinnamon uses up to 70% cpu. Gnome classic is around 2%. This is all at idle.

My specs are

Asus M2n32SLI Deluxe with AMD 64 6000+ X2 at 3GHZ
ATI HD 4670 1GB Ram video
1TB HD
6GB of Ram

Is there anyway to get this Mint OS to perform faster and less CPU intensive? Windows 7 runs circles around it the way it is now.

[Inkit]

Your problem is probably something else, and since I don't use mint 12 I can't help you there except maybe suggest that you try one of the other versions and find out if the same thing is happening.
What I did want to say though is that not all kernels will support a dual core processor. Also check if all your 6 gb of ram are displayed. Just check whether you can see both cores listed and the amount of ram in system monitor . If it is then well and good, If it isn't you'll probably have to install the pae kernel. This is relatively easy and no problem.

[tealflame]

The high CPU usage happens in everything except gnome classic. I dumped Mint 12 Gnome installation and just installed Mint 12 KDE X64.

What a difference. For me I think Mint 12 KDE is much faster and very responsive and CPU usage is very low around 0 when idle. I like the Mint distro because I am a beginner and like how everything is installed by default. I'm coming from Windows 7 which works very good. I just wanted to try Linux and learn it because I don't like what Windows 8 looks like. Plus I like the idea of added security and less virus/malware on Linux OS's.

Thanks for your reply.

[Inkit]

Good to hear that. And KDE is just as good as gnome, if not better depending on your point of view.

[kenkoy]

My Mint installation is 2 days old, after 3 months of problems with Ubuntu. Mint is beautiful, but I'm showing high CPU usage, similar to many of you. It shouldn't take 50% of all 4 cores for me to scroll a Firefox page!
My goal 3 months ago was to learn Linux in logical fashion, from the very basics, not by fighting one problem after another. So as a last resort, I'm interested in your suggestion here that KDE would be better on the CPU. Can someone recommend an accurate tutorial for dumping Gnome3/MGSE and installing KDE 64-bit? I don't know where to begin and I'm burned from other tutorials (for the Ubuntu) that turned out to have typos or other errors that I'm too new to recognize.
My newly-built machine is relatively powerful, so this has really disappointed me (ASRock z68 ExtremeG, i5-2500K, 8 Gigs RAM). My experiments with XP and 7 have shown this thing to be amazing in speed, and nothing, including Firefox, used CPU like what's happening here.
Thanks for any suggestions you folks might have!

[Inkit]

There are a number of reasons why your system can show high cpu usage starting from you not having updated your system. But leaving that aside, if you read up about KDE, you'll find that it was one of the first Desktop environments to come to linux. It's very good, but is considered a little heavy in resources. Gnome is generally not as high in system usage (no idea about gnome 3 here). And because of the architecture in Linux you are free to change whichever desktop environment you want, on the same installation. For instance, I have just the one LMDE installed in my system, but I've got the default gnome, xfce and openbox installed. I use xfce most often because it's much lighter than gnome and since I don't use too many of the extra features that gnome comes with, I don't miss it. I still retain the others simply because It's already installed and there's no earthly reason for me to uninstall it (lots of space on my system)
All you do is you open software manager and type in the name of the Desktop Environment (DE for short) that you want. Install the meta package that comes up in the results. This meta package will give you the basic DE, and you will have to add the other applications to it later. For instance when I added xfce I got the basic DE, but not one single application. So I had to manually install all the apps, starting from the system tray and menu buttons to the power manager and CD ripping and writing software that I wanted. Once installed all you do is, at your login screen where you put in your user id and password, just change the default login from gnome to whichever DE you want. in the panel at the bottom. This option however does not come up till you choose the login user.
Also it is best to read up on what the different DE's out there are. For instance xfce uses the same default libraries in gnome, so the metapackage is only a 20 mb or so ownload. KDE on the other hand uses an entirely different set of libraries and is an 800 MB download. Also all the applications you have installed in your system will be listed in the menu of all your DE's. This is a little confusing initially because although some of them will seem to work, they will not in reality and you will wonder why they are not working. You will have to use the apps of whichever DE you are in for whatever purpose you want.
I don't know if I've been clear enough, but there is a very detailed page on wikipedia on Desktop Environments that you can read. It takes a little getting used to, especially for a new entrant because everything will be subconsciously correlated to windows, and I'm not too sure what the equivalent to windows is for a DE. Once you clear your mind though, you find how nice it is to have a whole desktop as an application that you can change whenever you want.
There's lots else too, but everything comes with time.

[kenkoy]

Inkit: Thanks so much for your comments! I'm pretty sure by now that I don't want Gnome3, so instead of adding another DE to this setup, I'll install a Linux Mint with KDE, 64-bit, from scratch, and see how that goes. If also bulky, as you suggest (while others here say it's faster), I'll go your route via the Software Manager to test other DEs. If XFCE is not available as 64-bit, (if that even relates to DEs), I'll avoid it, too, though. I built this machine as a huge step up from my little old Pentium 4, so I want to experience its full potential, every nook and cranny of it! If nothing else, this will continue to be "interesting."

[Inkit]

If nothing else, this will continue to be "interesting."

That's the spirit. Too many people are comfortable with what they already know and don't want to learn anything new (my wife is a very good example here).

while others here say it's faster

Slower and faster are relative terms. I've never used KDE and it may very well be much faster than Gnome 3, but it's definitely not as fast as xfce. In any case, most DE's, even the heavy duty ones, don't take up much cpu and even a bare basic dual core will not lag.

There seems to be a number of bugs with Mint 12 and this is probably another one of them. This is why I initially asked you to try one of the earlier versions. If you've already used ubuntu before I'd actually suggest you try LMDE. It's not as difficult as people let on, and there are almost no breakages. And if you change your sources.list to point to latest, you're almost completely safe here.

Edit: I just like to recommend LMDE that's all.