New User Comparing Speeds of Windows and Ubuntu

[DougS]

In that case I may yet try my 1.3 AMD Duron system as dual boot.

As has been said, if it's faster/safer for basic web browisng etc AND you get to learn about it as well, that has to be good.

It's just that the times are sooooo much worse for a test that I must have spent a few days on in total.... any other thoughts?

[slibuntu]

Maybe RAM does make a difference, cos i've a gig

[MKR.]

Some things do load a bit slowly, but it's a minor issue to me.

A few seconds more load time for more functionality? I'm willing to live with it.

[Lord Illidan]

For bootup, you might want to try out initng, it reduces bootup speed by a real lot.. Had Ubuntu constantly beating Windows.

OpenOffice.org and Firefox are memory hogs. You will find that their performance is slow, yes.

You also have quite little RAM. Use Xubuntu, it is fast. Or else, ditch Ubuntu and try out Zenwalk Linux, it is another fast little distro(http://www.zenwalk.org)

Try using Abiword instead of Open Office and Opera or indeed, Epiphany instead of Firefox.

Also, keep in mind that for bootup, Ubuntu launches more things than Windows does. When you've filled up Windows with anti virii software, firewalls, msn messengers and the like, they get almost equal.

I am also wondering about dma.
Can you run :

sudo hdparm /dev/hd*

in a terminal, post the output here.

If you want a really, really fast OS, try Sylablle.

[kircher]

I've found windows xp boots much faster on my system than Ubuntu (P4 2.4GHz, 768MB ram), but running firewalls, AV etc on startup means that by the time windows is fully loaded, it's about the same as ubuntu. Also, check out this thread:- http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=89491. It shows how you can speed up the boot process quite a bit by disabling things you don't need. If you don't use raid, bluetooth etc, why load it at startup? I disabled some things using this tool, and it sped my boot up quite a bit. In general I find that my system runs faster in Ubuntu than it did in winXP, apart from initial boot times. Gnumeric and Abiword open 10x faster than word and excel. Open office is still rather slow though, but it's fairly fat. Firefox opens faster in Ubuntu than it did in XP. IE6 opens faster, but that's because of MS's nice secure idea of always having IE open even when it's closed. Same idea with windows media player.

[Knowles]

Isn't IE an intergrated part of the windows core? in which it would run faster no matter what?

[aysiu]

Ubuntu can be sluggish for whatever reason. The funny thing is that Ubuntu's live CD runs faster on my work computer than an installed version of XP does. But on my home computer, both the installed and live versions of Ubuntu run much more slowly than XP does (booting, running applications, etc.).

To make it even weirder, when I install and use kde-core instead of kubuntu-desktop, the launching of applications is a lot faster. For example, with kde-core, Firefox (a GTK app, mind you) takes three seconds to load. With kubuntu-desktop it takes ten seconds.

[bensexson]

I have found the WinXP appears to load faster but in reality it fools you by starting the GUI before it is really done. I typically have to wait 2 mins before it is really ready to use. On the other hand once Ubuntu is up it is ready to go.

[HanZo]

to add my experience to this topic, I ditched win xp from my compaq nx7000 laptop in favour of ubuntu because it was way faster. the problem is that windows takes ages to load because of the antivirus, firewall and all the stuff that needs to start at boot time, on my machine the time I was waiting, from the point where the desktop wallpaper first appeared and the point where I could actually work with the os was at least double the time between pressing the button and the desktop loading.
in ubuntu when you see the desktop you can use it, it's a different feeling.
the next problem was that when I forgot to defragment the box for some time it would get even slower.
firefox also was soooo slow on xp, and much faster on ubuntu.
plus somtimes xp is very slow in maximizing minimized apps, photoshop sometimes took me a minute or two to be maximized and usable after I had it minimized for more than 10 seconds. things like this never happend to me in ubuntu. and yes... photoshop running in crossover office feels faster than it does in windows... not for all things.. just sometimes... but funny anyhow.

[Maylar]

If it were me, I would not be running Ubuntu 6.06 on that system. I would run something like Damn Small Linux