Hi, I'm new in this forum. I have installed UM already on a few PC's (and Mac's). But this time I have some issues on a HP Pavilion dv6500 with AMD Turion 64 X2 and only 2 GB of Ram. There is a brand new 240 GB SSD in it. The installation went fine. UM is booting very fast and on the first look it might work ok. But if you begin to use app's the pain starts. Even Firefox is extrem slow on startup and finally it's not working. I freezes and crashes. Same with every other app. Everything is just very slow. It's UM 18.04 64 Bit, because the UM 20.04 USB-Drive was not recognized on this PC.
Besides of that, the WiFi seems not to work too and a cracking noise sounds from the speakers every few seconds.
Is there a way to make this work or do I need an other distro? If an other distro, which one?
Thanks for the help!
That is definitely old hardware for 18.04.
You can, perhaps, see what the problem is by:
boot up normally
open a terminal (Ctrl-Alt-T)
enter command
watch -n 1 free -h
Then proceed to check out your apps. If you see swap starting to build (You DID configure a swap FILE, right?) and all the memory is used up, then you need more RAM. Depending on the SSD, it may not be very suitable for use as swap, even in a file, and swapping is definitely hard on the lifetime of some SSD designs, and even SSDs are MUCH slower than RAM.
You can also check out some light apps to see if they work normally. Firefox is huge. Most office apps are huge. Text editors (e.g. pluma) are not.
See if you are running out of RAM or CPU. If there is memory contention going on, that will have to be fixed before you need bother with any of the other issues.
Thanks for the reply!
The command in the terminal says:
Ram: 1.9G 411M (used) 906M (free) 1.4G (available)
Swap: 2.0G 0B (used) 2.0 (free)
And there is no change if I start and quit an app!
Swap File? No, I didn't make any other than the regular installation process. The SSD was new and unformatted. I think there must be a swap partition?
Hello Entertaste
For 22.04 the minimum amount of RAM required is 1 GB, recommended is 4GB. As you are finding out the hard way, RAM is the most important part of your computer.
Which distro you run on your hardware is your choice. 
The AMD Turion 64 X2 was the first dual core processor by AMD. If I were in your situation, I would try MX Linux (xfce desktop): https://mxlinux.org/. It might work better, or perhaps not.
Could you consider upgrading the RAM to 4 GB?:
Supported memory types: DDR2-400, DDR2-533, DDR2-667
Maximum memory supported: "Generally speaking, if your dv6500 has an AMD Turion processor, DDR2-6400 memory will run at 800 MHz and the max memory you can install is 2 x 2 GB." [source: HP Pavilion dv6500 with AMD Turion 64 X2 what is maximum RAM?]
Tipp:
If you have two "RAM-slots" on your computer, I would suggest buying 2 new equal RAM-cards i.e. 2x 2GB. 
Swap file is the default, and you have one at 2.0GB.
There should be a change during the time the application is running, especially for a large application. Were you trying something like Firefox that reproduces your problem?
In any case, you will probably end up with more RAM. This is just a confirmation of what the problem is.
Maybe this will help (at least it is worth a try)
One of my laptops also has 2GB and is also a dual core turion.
It runs UM pretty fast for its age but the main difference between my laptop and the DV6500 in question is that I have a AMD GPU and the DV6500 has an Nvidia GeForce 8400 M GS which might be slowing down everything.
I think it coud be worth a try to disable compositing.
( Another thing is that the dv6500 is notorious for overheating w.r.t. the GPU so try to avoid 3D/gpu-acceleration)
And how I have to do that? Is there a setting I have to turn off or a terminal command? I couldn't find more information about this.
In the meantime I've tried UM 16.04 which runs smooth but has issues with the wired internet connection. (connection itself works sometimes, but even with connection no internet server is reachable).
The simple way is Settings > Mate Tweak > Windows > Window Manager (near the bottom) > Marco (No Compositor) then Close.