Before really getting into my final year project and revision for exams. I spent some time ugrading my 3+ years old laptop (Toshiba Tecra-S1) from Ubuntu 6.10 to 7.04 and optimising it. At the same time cleaned up my desk to have more space to work.

I have trying many different ways of optimising it with online resources including some websites and forums. Here are the changes or applications that I have installed that I felt have increased the performance dramatically.

• Upgrading to Xorg 7.2 beta (follow link for detials)
• Added all the respositories on this page and perform a update + upgrade
• Installed the windows manager E17, see below for details

Also tried out a windows manager called Enlightenment (E17), the installation was quite simple, updated some repos and did a apt-get install. Then just log out and change the session and everything works already. I have to say it looks very nice with many special effects, however after using it for a while (10 mins) I find that I prefer the normal gnome. The effects are just too much for me, but it’s quite impressive that it’s very fast with all these eye-candle enable. After I decided to go back to the normal gnome, I find that applications switching and menu loading are a lot faster. Not sure excatly why that is, possibly because some softwares and core has been updated.

Anyway I’m quite happy that everything is working fine now on this laptop and it doesn’t feel slow at all! It doesn’t take much time to load any application, if I don’t run any heavy program or applications, don’t think its responses is any slower than a new desktop. It’s amazing how Linux makes this possible, but at the same time I do feel that Linux is getting way too user friendly, a bit like windows!

Tags:7.04-Feisty-Fawn, computer, laptop, Linux, Technology, Toshiba-Tecra-S1, Ubuntu
Categories: Linux, Technology, Ubuntu, Weblog
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