Pentium 4 2.4/1GB S-L-O-W in Mint 13 Mate. Help?

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sohosources
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Pentium 4 2.4/1GB S-L-O-W in Mint 13 Mate. Help?

Post by sohosources »

Hi, gang:

I need to make a virus-proof "kid-puter" from on older Compaq desktop PC. It has 1 GB RAM and a Pentium 4 running at 2.4 GHz. The HD is IDE and 40 GB.

I ran MEMTEST and Seatools / Spinrite before I began to verify that the hardware was okay. It is.

This PC runs XP SP3 butter smooth, so I was very surprised to see that, when I installed Mint 13 LTS Mate, it's unusable, at least on the internet.

Firefox is slow and stuttery, with unacceptable lag on every keystroke and mouse click. It can barely play a youtube video (unexpended), and if I switch to full-screen mode, it's like a slide show. Since Firefox -- and Mint's VLC / Flash / etc, with everything working out of the box goodness -- is the primary use for this PC (browsing, online kid games, Facebook, etc), this is unfortunate.

Ubuntu 10.04 and 10.10, or Mint 10, my previous distros for virus-proof "kid and grandma" PCs, are getting old and may not support web-technology like flash, etc, so I'm reluctant to use them from now on.

I installed Mint 14 (Mate and Cinnamon) in a VM and didn't prefer it. I installed VMs of Mint 13 (Mate and Xfce), and Mate was "just right," while Xfce had trouble browsing my Windows shares, etc. In 1 GB VMs all versions were *very fast* (although my i7-930 box is about a million times faster than the old Compaq P4), so I was surprised at how choppy it was on the P4.

The only thing I haven't really checked yet is the wireless internet adapter. I just grabbed one that was laying around and, thanks to Mint 13, it "just worked." I haven't speed-tested it yet, and I haven't hooked it up to a wired network port.

Barring that, did I miss something?

I can try other distros, but I like Mint 13 Mate and my time is kinda limited :)

Thanks for your help!

--Kirk in MN
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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nunol
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Re: Pentium 4 2.4/1GB S-L-O-W in Mint 13 Mate. Help?

Post by nunol »

When the computer is slow open a terminal window, run top and look at what is using the CPU and/or RAM.

Flash is slower on Linux than in Windows and Firefox (or Chromium) is not the lightest browser around. Install addblock to block the publicity that slowdown the computer, try another light browser like Midori, use zram to improve performance, remove unused services, etc. Try fo fix your problem with XFCE or try LXDE, they are faster and lighter than MATE.

LMDE should be lighter than the main edition, if everything else fails try that.
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