Slow Ubuntu 9.10 on a Dell Inspiron 6400

Posted on February 24th, 2010 at 19:24
in

After upgrading a Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10 the machine was so slow it was barely usable. top was showing a load average of 7 after opening Firefox or OpenOffice.

Strangely no command was using more than 10% of the CPU, memory consumption seemed pretty normal and there was barely any disk activity. But the system was painfully slow.

After a couple of hours I decided to follow some obscure forum post (link lost, sorry) and I deleted the xorg.conf file and rebooted the machine. After the reboot the machine was as snappy as before the upgrade.

Weird.

On February 24th, 2010 Inferis (not verified) said:

You mean "I renamed the xorg.conf file to xorg.conf.bak (or something similar)". Right?

And oh: it's Linux. Of course it's weird. :p

On February 25th, 2010 litrik said:

Of course I made a backup of the xorg.conf file. Me no crazy :)

And yes, every Ubuntu upgrade breaks at least one major function. But hey... I was never able to upgrade a Windows machine without problems either...

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