My Ubuntu is really slow

Support & Help Requests
1

Hi everyone!

I had Ubuntu with gnome desktop and I didnt like it. So I installed Mate and at the beginning everything was ok but now ubuntu is really slow, mozilla has lags when i open a new tab, laptop got freezes and restarts. Laptop is Dell Latitude E 6510, i5 M520 (4 cores), 8gb RAM. What is the problem?

2

Looking at the specs sheet for your particular laptop, you appear to have:

NVIDIA® NVS 3100M 512MB gDDR3
Intel® HD Graphics

Are you using NVIDIA's driver or the open source one?

If the "slowness" is because the user interface is sluggish, or grinds to a halt with anything hardware accelerated (such as a YouTube video in Firefox) then it could be because you're not using NVIDIA's proprietary driver which is more efficient at handling the graphics.

You can check and install the alternate driver in:
System → Preferences → (Hardware) → Additional Drivers

If it's not that, then please could you elaborate on:

This is Ubuntu MATE we're talking about? Not Ubuntu (Unity) + MATE?

3

And what version of Ubuntu MATE?

4

Its 15.04. First it was Ubuntu with gnome3, but I didnt like it so I installed MATE so its Ubuntu (Gnome)+MATE.

On tab Additional Drivers I got only this one weirdo Screen

How to install proper Nvidia’s drivers?

5

Since the specification lists two graphics, I'm not sure whether it's got dual graphics or if it's indicating this particular model has either NVIDIA or Intel. You can check for sure by typing this in the terminal:

lspci

Post what you see under "VGA compatible controller" so we know which one is present on your system.

If there's only Intel Integrated listed, then there's no need as the graphics drivers are part of the kernel. The "slowness" problem may lie elsewhere than graphics performance.

But if there is an NVIDIA present, then we'll need to look into things a bit deeper into why the drivers are not available for you to install. You could manually install their binary drivers directly from their website, but this can result in serve problems if it goes horribly wrong. Additional Drivers is a tested, safer place for installing them.