[plug] Ubuntu woes

[Steve Baker]

Hi Plug,

I have a weird problem, I'm hoping someone can help.

I have a PC with 4GB RAM and a quad core CPU, with Intel 945 graphics 
and lots of discs on an Adaptec SATA RAID card.  I also have a Dell 
Latitude D820 laptop with 4GB and dual core CPU and nvidia graphics chipset.

Both systems run Ubuntu 8.04.  The laptop is perfectly fine - runs 
everything really well, fast, full compiz effects, etc. etc.  The PC is 
crap.  It's very very slow to boot, running aptitude safe-upgrade can 
take yonks, particularly if there is a kernel update and it has to run 
update-initrd. 

Disk i/o *seems* to be OK; I un-tarred a tgz file approx 300Mb and it 
unpacked quite quickly.  Network throughput seems to be normal.  I 
haven't run any CPU benchmarks, don't know what would give me any useful 
results.

When I log in, it can take 30secs or more after accepting the password 
before I get the $ prompt.  (This is NOT the well-known ssh reverse 
lookup timeout problem).  Sometimes when running a command (especially 
with a larger on-disk program size, eg. vi) it takes a few seconds to 
load the program, more than I would expect.

Those are the main symptoms, if anyone has any clues I can send relevant 
config info upon request.

Regards,
Steve