Slowed boot time and internet speed as result of upgrade from 8.10 to 9.04

During boot-up do you get to a menu with lots of options for booting into Ubuntu?

The 2nd ubuntu option should say "recovery mode" near the end of it's line, choose this line and you should get to another menu with lots of options worth doing about once a month anyway - "Clear some space" then "Fix broken packages" and lastly "fsck check and repair partition" and then go up to "continue with normal boot"

Another thing worth trying instead is to go up to the top-taskbar and click on

System - Administration - Synaptic Package Manager

it asks for your normal user password, not your SuperUser/Root one. In the "File" menu should be another option to "Fix broken Packages" also click on the "Mark all updates" before clicking on the "Apply" button. Hoppefully that shoud fix it. Synaptic is very useful for many different problems, it's worth hunting around it's menu's to have a look at some of what it can do :)

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

Well, I did everything you mentioned above, and the internet is a bit faster overall. Start-up time didn't change a bit, though - not that that's hugely important. Any other things to try on the internet connection?

Thanks,
Trish

In the web-browser (firefox?) try clicking on "Tools" menu on the top and then "Add-ons". In the pop-up box one of the tabs has a search feature - search for and install "Adblock Plus". This one usually speeds things up a bit. It's possible that some other add-on is causing slowdowns or it might be a wireless dongle with poor signal strength at the moment. Are you using wireless, Wiifi, bluetooth or something like that for your internet connection or has the machine got a wire to a router?

Installed Adblock Plus - now the speed depends on the page. I tried a few random sites, and some load in about 2 seconds, and other pages, including this one, took several seconds longer. That's not too-too slow, but I guess I just got used to the lightning fast net in 8.10.

As for connection, I'm running from a cable modem/

I had too "slowing" issues after upgrading from 8.10 to 9.04 via Update Manager. Then I just reinstalled 9.04 using LiveCD. And my complaints disappeared.

I haven't noticed the difference but i got too used to the slowness of Windows so i normally open a few tabs and leave them to download while i still read the old one. I noticed a tendency for web-pages to have more flashy whizzy bits that take ages to load whereas mainly text sites load a lot faster. I have drives that have upgraded and ones that have a fresh install but hadn't really looked for a difference.

I do know a trick for re-installing any Ubuntu without losing data & settings but would still advise copying the entire "/home" folder onto external drive or something temporarily just in case. Please let me know if you want to try this.

There is a hacker way to get faster downloads but its not the usual elegant way and tends to do more harm than good as it makes you more visible to all the web-sites you visit and simultaneously annoys the web-mistress/master. Not a good combination so its not a good hack ;)

Good luck and regards from
Tom :)

Ahah, of course it might be worth deleting (or better still renaming) your web-browsers profile and starting afresh. If that makes a huge difference then it'd be easier to re-import all your bookmarks and stuff if you had just re-named the old profile - also that would help if it made no difference and you just wanted to reinstate your old profile.

The easiest way to do this, assuming you're using firefox is to get to a command-line
Applications - Accessories - Terminal
and ino the terminal/command window/console type

cd /etc/firefox-3.0
ls

Note that "ls" is a lower-case "LS" and produces a LiSt od everything in the folder in colour code, hopefully. You might want to go up to the "View" menu and tick the "Show hidden files/folders" for this. Then i think the "mv" command (for MoVe) does folders as well as files so type

sudo mv profile old-profile

the "sudo" command needs your normal user password, not yur SuperUser/Root one but it does give you very powerful privileges which can easily mess up your system so it's worth avoiding it when you can. Unlike in Windows you can do almost everything as normal user so you don't keep finding yourself in root-user mode. That's one main reason why linux is so virus-free :) Some guides here if you want to check
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UsingTheTerminal?action=show&redirect=BasicCommands
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Antivirus

Command-line tricks ...
Note that when you're using the command-line you can often use the tab key to autocomplete, correctly any commands or pathnames. If what you've typed up to that point gives options then you'll need totry double tapping the tab key to see the alternatives. Another neat trick is that the up-arrow on your keyboard (or rolling the mouse wheel) goes back to previous commands, even ones from previous boot-ups! Also any command has a neat little help-cheat-sheet, just add " --help" after a command, try typing "mv --help" for example. Possibly most usefully it's worth noting that although CtrlV doesn't paste into a command-line <shrugs> mouse paste works fine so you can just copy what i typed and then use a right-click on yur mouse to paste it into your terminal console :)))

I hope this helps after all that! You'll need to close and re-open firefox for it to take effect but you wont need to reboot. This should do much the same as re-installing the entire system as far as firefox is concerned but is a much more elegant answer, one typical of linux :)

Thanks, good luck with this!
Regards from
Tom :)