[Nottingham] Aspire One Performance

[Rory Holland]

Seeing those posts on the iPlayer reminded me of my own Aspire One
performance issues.
I have an Acer Aspire one with 512mb RAM and an 8Gb SSD
I am running Ubuntu Netbook Remix (9.10 - is it beta yet?), but have
had this problem with most Linux distros

The interface is slow and unresponsive; hovering over an icon will
take a good few seconds before it "highlights", and I'll have to wait
a while when opening applications.
I have no compositing, I'm not even using metacity's compositing
features. It's worse with Compiz.

I think the problem may be with the Intel graphics, as I heard there
were major performance issues in Jaunty. I am, however, surprised they
weren't fixed in Karmic.

I'm not using any swap space, as the SSD is very slow, and I think may
be part of the problem.

Does anyone have any ideas how I can get a more responsive system? I'm
loathe to switch to something like IceWM or OpenBox, as I've grown
accustomed to the power of Gnome (metacity, specifically)

James

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