MATE performance on a netbook

Support & Help Requests
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#1

Hello,

I know this one is going to be very difficult to answer but I wondered if anyone had any thoughts on the following;

I’ve got an old netbook (dual Intel atom N270 @1.6Ghz, 3gb RAM) which came with Windows XP installed. I’ve used MATE on a virtual machine on a Mac and thought it would give the netbook a new lease of life.

Knowing MATE (and xbuntu, which installed on another partition on the netbook) are fairly lightweight, I was expecting the performance to be pretty nippy so was surprised when both distros were considerably slower than Windows for the same tasks (opening a browser, and similar non-intensive tasks that I thought would be limited by Hdd speed).

So my question is, is this what you would expect? Am I asking too much of Linux to run well on such old tech? Why would a lightweight distro take longer to open chrome than Windows?

Very hard to answer I know, but I’d love to know your thoughts…

Many thanks,
Rich.

#2

I have read of dual core atom’s doing fine with both distros. But who knows what the definition of fine is in these cases.

The lightest distro ubuntu has to offer is Lubuntu. Maybe time to give that a try.

#3

Thanks, I’ll give it a go.

Strange thing is, it doesn’t seem to be maxing out the cpu/ram… It just takes an age to load anything (i.e. 15-20sec to load chromium) compared to Windows on the same machine.

All of which made me wonder, if it’s not a ‘heavyweight’ DE slowing things down, could it be Linux not playing well with the hardware?

Anyway, thanks for the advice, I’ll give it a go…

#4

Just FYI, one of my computers is an old desktop PC which used to ran Windows XP, about 8 or 9 years (I’m not sure). It has a cpu Intel E4500, 3GB of RAM and a Nvidia GeForce 7600GS, and it runs fine, Compiz really smooth.

Hope this help… :grinning:

#5

Could be.

Without having my hands on one, I cannot really say.

#6

I have an Intel Atom netbook (Dell Inspiron Duo) that’s similar to yours – Dual core, 1.7 GHz, 2 GB of RAM but had Windows 7 pre-installed, so it newer-ish.

:By far, it was much, much faster then Windows 7 ever was. Even a 3D game like Minecraft had improved frame rates under Ubuntu (but still, it’s weak hardware).

Overall, it’s neither too slow or “speedy”. It would probably benefit greatly if I were to invest a solid state drive. Otherwise I find once programs are open (cached in memory), it was satisfactory to use the device for lightweight stuff.

I’d recommend installing the 32-bit (i386) version, even if it’s 64-bit capable. The 64-bit (amd64) uses more RAM and these under-powered systems would benefit utilising as much RAM as possible for caching.

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#7

Here’s a link to netbook specs that I was able to make functional after installing UM 16.04

#8

Thanks all so much for your help,

Apologies, I should have mentioned, I am running the 32-bit version…

It sounds like my experience seems to be unusual then. My gut tells me Linux should be faster (or at least as fast?) than Windows.

Perhaps I’ll chalk this one up to a mystery and just use Windows on it… shudders.

Thanks again for the input…

#9

My experience is that optimized 32-bit version of Windows (XP or 7) is just as fast or faster than most Linux distributions.

Also software (Firefox, Chrome) and drivers are better optimized.

The thing with Windows is that you have to kill all unnecessary background processes so the OS isn’t handicapped by those. It’s the bloat that is making Windows slow. NT kernel and NTFS filesystem are just as good as Linux and EXT4 from my limited understanding.

#10

That’s interesting… I wondered if that might be the case that Windows would be optimised for the limited hardware.

Out of interest, having said the cpu wasn’t taxed, I just checked again and with no programs running and the computer just restarted, the CPUs seem to be taking it in turns to run at 100%! When I check what processes are running and sort by %cpu, nothing seems to be using cpu… Very odd.

#11

#12

Just out of interest, I ran task manager on xbuntu and saw a similar effect. Cpu running at constant high loads, with no applications running.

Compared to Windows where the cpu was ticking over at a couple of % at idle.

Does anybody know what could be causing this load on the CPUs in Ubuntu/Xbuntu but not in Windows on the same device?

Thanks.

#13

In Ubuntu MATE System Monitor click View in menubar and select All Processes. By default you only see “My Processes” I believe. Then sort your processes so that highest CPU comes first (arrow pointing up or down, don’t remember).

#14

Open a terminal window and type:

top

and post the results here please.

#16

Thank you all again for your help.

Here are the results of the ‘top’ command in xbuntu and MATE:

As an aside, I get this warning when I try and shutdown in MATE, not sure if it’s related?:

#17

Think I may have cracked it, a search resulted in this nugget:

It seems that the issue is caused by iPad/iPhone pretending to offer Ethernet connection and “upowerd” automatically trying to enable that connection. This operation fails and “upowerd” is stupid enough to repeat the process forever.

…and I was charging an iPad from the laptop.

iPad removed, cpu now back to idle!

Laptop isn’t any faster but at least I’ve learnt something :wink:

Apologies for taking this thread around the houses, I appreciate your help trying to troubleshoot…(especially the ‘top’ tip).
R.

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