Howto fix slow and choppy flash/video on ThinkPad T61 running Ubuntu Jaunty

Posted on September 30, 2009, 2:06 am, by Mayank Jain (makuchaku).

Very recently, I upgraded from Ubuntu Intrepid to Ubuntu Jaunty – and to my horror, the system went very slow! I wasn’t sure what was causing the problem but Xorg reported near 100% CPU utilization in “top” output, Firefox felt very very heavy, flash videos on youtube were choppy and slow – even Gedit felt like a 200 megs java app – …that slow!

I googled a bit and realized that many were facing the same problem. Reason were the Intel video drivers in Jaunty.

This is how I fixed my Lenovo ThinkPad T61 running on Ubuntu Jaunty

Installed Kernel

Linux Warrior 2.6.28-15-generic #52-Ubuntu SMP Wed Sep 9 10:49:34 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux

My T61′s Graphics Card

00:02.0 “VGA compatible controller” “Intel Corporation” “Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller” -r0c “Lenovo” “Device 20b5″

Step 1
Follow the guide at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReinhardTartler/X/RevertingIntelDriverTo2.4 and install xserver-xorg-video-intel-2.4 package/drivers. Restart GDM.
After installing these drivers, my system was back to sanity (firefox, gedit, etc) – however, flash videos were still choppy.

Step 2
Follow the changes mentioned at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Troubleshooting/IntelPerformance and reboot.
This fixed the choppy flash issues for me.

Step 3
Thanks to the comment http://allredb.wordpress.com/2009/05/07/speed-up-flash-and-firefox-in-ubuntu-jaunty-904/#comment-2 – use the CPU Frequency scaling applet to make your CPU cores perform permanently at peak levels. Though this will cause higher battery consumption, I guess you are looking for better CPU speed (considering you are reading this post )