[HLUG] laptop installation problems

[j michaelson]

i'm trying to get ubuntu installed on my brother daniel's laptop. for
some reason it the install cd kept hanging, so what i did was stick a
harddrive in my laptop, install ubuntu on it and then put it back in
daniel's and booted.

it seemed to work to some degree, the laptop booted, i could log in
and the desktop appeared, but everything was painfully slow. if i
clicked a desktop icon then it would take about 10 seconds to come up.
i ran top and xorg was taking up 20% of the processor even when
nothing was happening. so i'm guessing it's because the hardware it's
running on isn't the hardware it was installed on.

anyone know how i can get ubuntu to repeat all the hardware detection
stuff it does during install?

thanks.
john.