How to make Ubuntu 13.04 faster

Question

After I installed everything I needed, Ubuntu became slower and slower. I uninstalled some things and it became little bit faster but still wasn't fast. I did a fresh installed of Ubuntu 13.04 and formatted 12.10 then installed Ubuntu 13.04 since 12.10 was getting slow.

Answer 1

You should have a look to which programs you installed are running in the background after login, and remove the ones you don't need. The programs would be still installed, but won't run until you need them. In a terminal, type:

gnome-session-properties

You'll see something like this:

Just don't disable any program before knowing is safe (search the names in the web, to see what their function is).

More items you can disable, but this time services. In a terminal:

sudo apt-get install rcconf

sudo rcconf

Again, these are not programs but services (daemons in GNU/Linux) so search the web to see which ones you can disable safely. For instance, I don't have a printer nor a modem so I always disable CUPS and modem-manager.

Another thing, install preload, an utility that loads libraries into memory according to how often you use them:

sudo apt-get install preload

And that's it, the program will run in the background, you don't need to configure it or anything.

Hope it helps!