Can't understand why my computer is slow :(

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Yep and I just got through screaming at because I hate it when it's whirring up (The computer's fan really going) and acts really really slow

This computer has Debian Linux installed for crying out loud and over forty gigabytes of harddisk space as well as one and half gigabytes of RAM, yet this thing has it's moments when it's really slow and unresponsive at times ?

Do I need to install some more RAM into this thing or is Linux no better than Microsoft upper the specs just to run a freaking OS ? Slitaz worked for me until I installed an unofficial package and libraries using the package converting command for the distro and now I got some Pam error (if I could remember correctly) where re-installing the OS doesn't work :/

I'd install something a little lighter on here but they don't have any drivers for my old wireless device. I'm thinking that maybe I could get rid of Gnome completely but is afraid that lighter desktop or window managers would depend on something from Gnome.

Any suggestions and no I do not want to go back to Windows as I like digging around my Linux box and I've heard it's the best tool to learn programming with. Well I suppose anything that isn't proprietary is the best to learn programming with.

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Are you able to run any diagnostics to see where the processing power is going? It is also worth while checking for disk or ram faults/errors as a slower than normal computer can be an indication of imminent failure as the computer keeps retrying bad sectors etc.

All hardware comes to its end eventually. Is it possible a piece of yours is giving out?

If it was a Windows machine, I would suspect either malware/virus or a badly fragmented hard drive.

Both would really slow down performance.

I kept having problems with mine, thought perhaps its just getting old, turned out that its the browser regardless if not because of the updates. used a different browser and it started working like a dream.

^^^^ try clearing out your cache in original browser

I was hoping that it wasn't being piss poor in performance because of the twenty three bad sectors I guess I can't turn away from the truth, I'm going to have to replace my hard-disk drive with another one ...

Actually, the 2x swap rule is a bit outdated. The rule stems from back when Linux memory manager was significantly less sophisticated.

I've been using Linux pretty much exclusively since early 2011, and before that, I've used it off and on since Kernel 2.2.10, so perhaps I'm holding on to the 2X physical Memory Swap space as a holdover from that era.

Doesn't Unix platforms designate bad sectors so they aren't used? Wouldn't that "fix" the problem (not addressing whether bad sectors = warning to replace the HDD anyhow)?

Based on my own experience, Ubuntu does not. Keep in mind that Linux is an imitation of Unix and not a port. If you try FreeBSD (which is an improved port of Unix), you'll see that there are significant differences.

On modern drives (up to ten years old, at least) sectors that go bad are automatically reallocated from a limited stash of good ones by drive firmware, but if it's got to the point where they surface as bad at the FS level then the drive is probably in deep trouble and likely to get worse.
Aspects of this, and more, can be examined on drives implementing the S.M.A.R.T. system which, AFAIK, means all modern drives; *buntu and other Linux distributions include the smartmontools package which enables drive health data to be monitored. This has been available for years.

But even if a bad sector does surface at the FS level (say, ext4) it certainly is possible to mark the block using it as bad and have the OS avoid it - see ext4.fsck -c and the other e2fsprogs utilities. Bad blocks can also be discovered with badblocks. Any files using blocks that have gone bad can be found via dumpe2fs and debugfs (e2fsprogs) then restored from backup.
These binaries have also been available in Linux distributions for several years.