AMD E350 with ATI Radeon HD - very slow on video playback

[anon222]

You could reduce the swap use. That will speed up your PC.
By default it's set to 60.
The Linux kernel provides a tweakable setting that controls how often the swap file is used, called swappiness.
A swappiness setting of zero means that the disk will be avoided unless absolutely necessary (you run out of memory), while a swappiness setting of 100 means that programs will be swapped to disk almost instantly. If it's set to 60, the swap file will be used fairly often if the memory usage is around half of my RAM. You can check your own system's swappiness value.
Ctr+Alt+T to open Terminal then type in:

Code:

cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

Should be 60.
As I have 3 GB of RAM, I've turned it down to 10. The swap file will then only be used when my RAM usage is around 90 percent. To change the system swappiness value, open /etc/sysctl.conf as root.

Code:

gksudo leafpad /etc/sysctl.conf

Then, add this line to the end file:

Code:

vm.swappiness = 10

Save it: File...Save.
Reboot for the change to take effect.
Now check it again.

Code:

cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
10

To calculate your swap Formula

free -m (total) / 100 = A

A * 10

Code:

free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          3009       2689        320         47         51        993
-/+ buffers/cache:       1644       1364
Swap:         3068          0       3068

total is 3009 / 100 = 30.09 * 10 = 300.9
That means when 10%, 300.9 MB of ram is left then it starts to use the swap.

I assume you are using propriatary drivers.
Next, you could install microcode. This is usefull only for AMD processors from the year 2006 and up. Your is newer I think.

Code:

sudo apt-get install amd64-microcode

Reboot after that.
Now check whether the microcode has been loaded properly.

Code:

dmesg | grep microcode

You should see several reports about the applied microcode.