Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS, 12.04 LTS, 12.10 On An Old Laptop

The PostMark disk performance had improved between Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (there was also the move from EXT3 to EXT4), but with Ubuntu 12.10, there is no change in performance compared to the four-year-old Long-Term Support Linux distribution.

The NAS Parallel Benchmarks from NASA that are computationally heavy did improve between Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, likely due to GCC compiler improvements between the 4.2 and 4.6 releases. However, the GCC 4.7 release doesn't seem to improve these multi-threaded Fortran tests on Ubuntu 12.10 for this Intel Core Duo laptop.