My initial suggestions are:
- Replace the disk with an SSD
- Buy more RAM
- Get a better computer
Based off the age and specs of the machine. However if none of these are possible for you right now, we can try and diagnose where the bottleneck is (which may indeed lead to one of the above answers anyway).
Install a good monitoring tool:
In a terminal run
sudo apt update
then
sudo apt install dstat
Reboot, so your memory and caches are clean, then in a terminal run this with no applications open and leave it running:
dstat --time --load -cdngy --top-cpu --top-mem --top-io
It looks like this, and updates every second:
----system---- ---load-avg--- --total-cpu-usage-- -dsk/total- -net/total- ---paging-- ---system-- -most-expensive- --most-expensive- ----most-expensive----
time | 1m 5m 15m |usr sys idl wai stl| read writ| recv send| in out | int csw | cpu process | memory process | i/o process
12-05 08:42:39|3.20 2.64 2.42| 8 2 89 0 0| 0 1744k|7839B 157k| 0 0 |7264 8501 |msedge 6.5|msedge 788M|msedge 22M 9323B
12-05 08:42:40|3.20 2.64 2.42| 9 2 88 1 0| 0 248k| 26k 192k| 0 0 |7095 8251 |msedge 6.5|msedge 787M|msedge 21M 26k
12-05 08:42:41|3.20 2.64 2.42| 8 2 90 0 0| 0 288k|6320B 206k| 0 0 |6961 7879 |msedge 6.4|msedge 787M|msedge 21M 5897B
Launch a browser. Once it finishes launching, go back to the terminal, and capture the output.
My guess is you will see under --total-cpu-usage-- the usr and probably sys value rise, indicating high cpu usage. -dsk/total- read will likely be high as it's reading all the little files that make up the browser and associated libraries. Under -most-expensive- cpu process I'd expect initially dstat to appear or perhaps the terminal process, but later it will switch to the browser process. Under ---most-expensive--- i/o process you'll see the browser show up.
All of this will essentially mean that the CPU is slow and waiting for blocks to be read from disk. The fix for that is to get a better CPU (replace computer) or faster disk (get an SSD) or more RAM (so more blocks are cached).
Feel free to post the 30 or so lines from dstat in a pastebin, or add them to the bottom of your question.
