How to Speed Up your Slow Ubuntu PC

Startup Applications

The first thing to do is to manage the startup applications and just to let the most important once to launch when you boot your laptop.

By disabling the unnecessary once you free up some space of the RAM and you allow our laptop to launch faster.

To do so you just need to open the Dash and type “startup”.

This will open up the Startup Applications utility where you can manage all the applications you have. If you can’t find all the applications that’s cause Ubuntu hides most of the system’s default autostart entries. To show them, run this command in your terminal:

Sudo sed –i ‘s/NoDisplay=true/NoDisplay=false/g’/etc/xdg/autostart/*.descktop

Preload

You can also install Preload which is a daemon. This is a background service that keeps track of the most applications you use on your computer and load them into the memory as soon as you boot your laptop without launching them to make it faster for you in case you opened one of them it launches so fast.

To install Preload on your Ubuntu laptop, run this command in your terminal:

Sudo apt-get install preload

Lighter Desktop Environment

You can also change your desktop to a lighter one that the default desktop of Ubuntu. There are many others that much more lighter for exemple ou can use XFCE, LXDE, Openbox, Xmonad.

Swappiness

The SWAP partition is simply extra space that the system can use if the RAM is full, or if something has been sitting in RAM for a long time but isn’t being used. The system also dumps the contents of the RAM into the SWAP partition when you hibernate your system.

The swappiness value is between 0 and 100 which is:

·         0: The kernel will avoid swapping process out of physical memory and onto the swap partition for as long as possible.

·         100: The kernel will aggressively swap processes.

You can change the swappiness to 10 and to do so you need to open the terminal and write this command:

sudo bash -c "echo 'vm.swappiness = 10' >> /etc/sysctl.conf"

This will change the swappiness in the file sysctl.conf

But if you don’t want to change it once for all you can change it temporarily until the next restart of your laptop with this command:

Sudo sysctl vm.swappiness=10

Clean unneeded files

Finally, you have to clean up some unneeded files and to do so you can use Ubuntu Tweak. It’s a tool that’s gonna delete only the files not needed without touching any file you may need.