To big a drain on my HD?
Thanks.
I’m assuming that when you say your “screen dims”, you mean the LibO window goes dark grey; if you mean something else, please explain more fully. There could be a variety of reasons, but it would help to know:
(a) how much RAM your Lenovo has;
(b) what its CPU is;
(c) how many programs you are running at the same time; and
(d) whether this happens with all files, or just certain ones (large? multilingual? formatting? embedded objects?).
In my experience “greying out” is a function of a maxed CPU, rather than memory, and when I have other programs open at the same time (e.g., web browser with multiple tabs open), but that is on a fairly antique Toshiba. (My OS on that machine is Linux Mint 13 LTS Xfce.) It has never been related to the HD, though.
Hi, thanks for answering and the further questions.
Yes my widow goes dark grey, usually when i insert a jpeg or save the document. I know the jpeg’s are large files because my printshop grumbles about them.
The ram is 2gig with an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU P8400 @ 2.26GHz × 2 - what ever that means.
At the moment I’m only running 2 tabs on Mozilla and the RAM is 62% used with the CPU usage around 10 -20% so it’s almost like the opposite of what you suggest. I will keep an eye on what is operating over the next couple of days and see if this relates to the greying out - I’l get back with any developments.
Thanks,
Geoff
Back again,
I fired up Deluge and started a download, opened a PDF in Libre and resaved; firefox was still open.
CPU1 useage went up to 90% but CPU2 stayed pretty low. RAM did not move over 50%.
The screen greyed out when i hit ‘save’ in Libre.
So it looks like a case of CPU maxing out. I’m guessing that this is not really solvable except by doing one job at a time right? Or is it related to the fact that the Ubuntu OS is in a relatively small partition - 40gig ?
Geoff
@G1 - To compare, I’m running Firefox with two tabs on a machine with 1Gb RAM, Celeron 1.4Ghz and 38Gb HD: my mem usage is 25%; CPU is 15%. I rarely get LibO dimming, so more a system than LibO issue. Could it relate to how your “swappiness” is set up? Check this Ask Ubuntu Q&A on swappinesss, as well as the related/linked posts in the right-hand sidebar. That might fix it. Or install Lubuntu instead 
which I’ve used extensively. It’s great!
thanks for the advice - i’ll follow up on the swap issue and lok into kubuntu as another option although not to keen to depart ubuntu mainly because I’ve piut so much bloody work into get it right for me! I’ll convert my last post to be the answer as it seems that’s what is happening. Thanks for your help,
Geoff - New Zealand
@G1 - hope you can sort it, and I quite understand about the reluctance to try another distro. I was stuck in Ubuntu 9.04 far too long because … I had set it up! In my experience, Kubuntu is pretty demanding on resources, but either Xubuntu or Lubuntu should run like lightning. My current favourite low-resource distro is Linux Mint Xfce - it just works. FWIW. Happy hunting!
CPU is maxing out due to work load of which Libre is only a part of the problem.