Hello there, I have a list of problems that I am hoping to find solutions to, which is why I turn to you guys as so far you haven’t failed me. I’ve been having these problems for a little while now, the laptop seems unusually slow especially when I am wanting to browse the internet and listen to music, at first I thought it was just the Amarok but I’ve been running Clementine and I find I have the same problem.
Youtube videos tend to lag a little as well, on either Firefox or Chrome. In fact it seems to be worse on Chrome sometimes.
I also use Spotify via WINE on a regular basis, but over the past couple of months every time I try and run it nothing happens and when I check out the system activity it says that Spotify is in Zombie mode. At the moment WINE isn’t letting me un-install it and start again.
I currently run OpenSUSE 13.1 with KDE 4.14, the laptop specs are 2.0 GHz and RAM is 2 GB.
There are couple more issues and I’ll let you know when I remember them. Thanks in advance.
KDE and Chromium are quite memory hungry so I’m pretty sure you are running on swap - next time the system is slow, open a terminal and type free and copy paste it here.
Also, I found the easy way to uninstall windows apps from wine when I couldn’t get them to budge was to uninstall wine and then make sure all wine/windows directories were physically “sent to trash” then start again.
Can be, can be. Browser memory usage is, at a first order, proportional to the number of tabs that you’ve got open, so opening a lot of tabs can be a killer (essentially, with any browser). An additional element is the number of ‘widgets’ or ‘add-on’ you’ve got installed, so, if you’ve gone at the browser like a starving man at an all you can eat buffet, your ‘overhead, per tab’ will be greater.
In addition, I’d turn all of the ‘semantic desktop’ stuff off in kde, at least for debugging. That gives the hard disk a tough time, and ‘randomly’ (non-synchronously with any direct user action would be a better phrase) starts doing disk accesses, so it makes it more difficult to know what else is accessing the disk (because there is always the random stuff, as well, which reduces clarity).
(KDE probably should use about 500M, with nothing much running, and you are starting from only 2G (maybe less with integrated video, which would be normal on a laptop!), so that doesn’t leave a massive amount of headroom.)
Is the disk light flashing, post the free result, have a look in ksysguard and then we can get going.
Another problem that I got reminded about yesterday when I tried it was USB connection to my Windows phone. It just won’t open either the SD portion of it or the internal memory.
Hello there, I have a list of problems that I am hoping to find solutions to, which is why I turn to you guys as so far you haven’t failed me. I’ve been having these problems for a little while now, the laptop seems unusually slow especially when I am wanting to browse the internet and listen to music, at first I thought it was just the Amarok but I’ve been running Clementine and I find I have the same problem.
Youtube videos tend to lag a little as well, on either Firefox or Chrome. In fact it seems to be worse on Chrome sometimes.
I also use Spotify via WINE…
I currently run OpenSUSE 13.1 with KDE 4.14, the laptop specs are 2.0 GHz and RAM is 2 GB.
There are couple more issues and I’ll let you know when I remember them. Thanks in advance.
Having a laptop with oS13.2_64, Integrated video. KDE. Firefox.
I had the same problems my self on a old laptop that you are having (minus Spotify/wine that I dont use). The solution was easy, - invested €37.30 (US $41.90) in additional 2GB DDR SO-Dimm Ram for my laptop (now 4GB). My laptop stopped swapping to the HD. Well it still does but after manage a lot more open/running applications/functions.
Or more ram is wasted because of “for a little while now”, “over the past couple of months”
What has changed? Used to work ok? Video drivers? Audio?
You should be able to get KDE under 300mb at boot up. Is what I get on a desktop with not much running and dual monitors which I guess pump up memory for plasma-desktop, Xorg. Need to fiddle about with services, auto-start, desktop effect plugins, krunner plugins and what not but, settings are all over the place in KDE but all counts. Semantic is gone of course. No reason to run 1 pulse audio process if ALSA works fine, how you should run through it all.
Have no idea of the Wine stuff but 2gb ram should be enough to get decent result with sensible usage should it not? Cpu usage as seen in system monitor might hint something?
Agree 100%
A big boost here on an old athlon x86_64 laptop with 4 gig of ram.
The swap is using zram, this laptop used to boot in more than one minute
with the new ssd drive boots between 6 to 10 seconds depending on how much time
apparmor and network does there things.
Responsiveness when running applications has improve.
Lastly the openSUSE 13.2 was installed with xfce, with some kde and gnome stuffs.
Then later on I added e19. Right now I an using e19 so I can have a little bit of bling-blings
and still reponsive enough for what I do with this laptop.
The 4gig ram and rotating disk was included when I bought the laptop.
So it was the SSD that I used replacing the original rotating disk that did
the boot made quicker.
As others have noted, a Desktop like KDE can give you a “better” experience with 4GB RAM, but if your system is limited to 2GB you will have issues.
If your system is limited, you should consider changing your Desktop, I have several 2GB virtual machines running nicely with LXDE. XFCE is another Desktop with similar RAM requirements. Besides fewer unnecessary visual effects, these Desktops typically also offer apps to perform common functions which use less RAM than KDE or Gnome.
