If you haven't bought an SSD you really should

I just finished upgrading my home workstation from Xubuntu 18.10 to 19.04 and the upgrade not only went smoothly but finished in less than 30 minutes. This might seem like a long time, fresh installs can literally be minutes when using a flash drive to install to an SSD, but upgrades usually take a long time.

Lately when someone asks what they can do to speed up their computer I almost universally recommend they upgrade to an SSD over upgrading RAM/CPU/etc. One of our local computer shops has been carrying a 120GB SSD for $26.99. I bought one of these SSDs about 2 years ago for $69.99 and at the time felt it was a pretty good deal. Although the write speed on this particular SSD is only 350Mb/s it's still much better than the speed of a 'spinning rust' hard drive.

During a distribution update more than a thousand files get updated and often more than 2,000 files are downloaded. The process also involves deleting some packages, and unpacking a number of programs before installation. Updates are pretty complex, but developers have made this pretty seamless under Xubuntu.

This afternoon we had someone bring in an HP Core 2 Duo that they had an older version of Xubuntu on. They were okay with us putting a fresh install on their system. After the installation we noticed a lot of artifacting on the screen. We opened up the system and discovered a number of bad capacitors, but I also seem to recall the onboard video for these particular HP machines was not much better than the HP Pentium 4 offering, so we stuck a half-height AMD video card with a DMS59 connector in the machine (it was the only half-height card we had that didn't only have DisplayPort connectors). The AMD video card did the trick, gone was the screen tearing and performance was quite a bit better, but nothing like having an SSD.

When the person comes to pick up the system tomorrow we'll probably encourage them to buy an SSD (even though we're referring them to somewhere else to buy the SSDs). It really makes a huge difference to certain processes like updating.

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