new_vintage
Member
It sure sounds like a slow connection though. Your inxi shows ethernet down, wireless up. That would be consistent with the symptoms.
Solved A quick Dell Latitude question - edited, more help needed
- Thread starter Beachcomber
- Start date
Solved issue
It sure sounds like a slow connection though. Your inxi shows ethernet down, wireless up. That would be consistent with the symptoms.
Condobloke
Well-Known Member
OP
Beachcomber
Member
The poor girl
Thanks for all your help on this, and for looking over that readout from last night. It's actually working pretty quickly this morning, playing Youtube videos on HD without problems, so I'm really hoping it is an internet speed issue afterall. I checked our broadband speed this morning and it says 24 Mbps - I'll check back on that if the laptop slows down again. It's just odd that my own laptop was its usual speedy self. I'll go and have a read through that link to speed up Mint.
I didn't install any additional drivers following the installation, and the updates are all up to date. The only additional thing I installed was the AdGuard ad blocker on Firefox.
Condobloke
Well-Known Member
fwiw uBlock origin would be lighter. Your call there
What speed are you supposed to get from the ISP (internet service provider)....24 mbps is very slow.
In the system tray (near the clock) there will be an icon, which if you hover your mouse over it, will say, "connected to the wireless/wired network . Which one does it say?
What speed are you supposed to get from the ISP (internet service provider)....24 mbps is very slow.
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Condobloke
Well-Known Member
Network stuff...wireless, wired , etc
If it suits the circumstances there where the laptop is being used, ethernet cable (wired internet) will always give better results. (especially where the speed from the isp is not so good)
But your mum may like the idea of sitting in different places in the house and that may not play well with an ethernet cable. you can buy very long ethernet cables, but that could cause problems with someone tripping over it.
The cable cannot be too long as far as it working ok is concerned. I have a 15 metre cable her which does not downgrade the capacity of the internet to work.
Another option is to find out accurately what the mbps (mega bytes per second) download speed is supposed to be. it should be stated on the invoice/bill etc
The only thing that really worries me is that your laptop is its usual speedy self. That has me puzzled.
www.fosslinux.com
Just a thought.
Click on menu and type in: Driver Manager...tap enter.
Tell me what's there.
If it suits the circumstances there where the laptop is being used, ethernet cable (wired internet) will always give better results. (especially where the speed from the isp is not so good)
But your mum may like the idea of sitting in different places in the house and that may not play well with an ethernet cable. you can buy very long ethernet cables, but that could cause problems with someone tripping over it.
The cable cannot be too long as far as it working ok is concerned. I have a 15 metre cable her which does not downgrade the capacity of the internet to work.
Another option is to find out accurately what the mbps (mega bytes per second) download speed is supposed to be. it should be stated on the invoice/bill etc
The only thing that really worries me is that your laptop is its usual speedy self. That has me puzzled.
The Ultimate Guide to Linux Mint Network Configuration (2026)
From fixing ghost 'interfaces' file conflicts to managing DNS via resolvectl, I show you the correct modern network workflow for Linux Mint in 2026.
www.fosslinux.com
Just a thought.
Click on menu and type in: Driver Manager...tap enter.
Tell me what's there.
Condobloke
Well-Known Member
@CaffeineAddict, any thoughts here ?
CaffeineAddict
Well-Known Member
I don't know, if I had this laptop I'd try out a few live distros and see if performance is any better in one of them.
new_vintage
Member
Also, bear in mind the difference between Mbps vs MBps. Mbps is actually megabits per second. MBps is megabytes per second. Mbps = 8 x MBps. ISPs usually quote Mbps.
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OP
Beachcomber
Member
Sorry for being quiet on this yesterday, it turned out to be a busy day and in the evening I just fell asleep!
I'm on her laptop again now and have done the speedtest command again:
Download: 23.52 Mbit/s
Upload: 11.75 Mbit/s
... which agrees with the broadband speed checker, which this morning is showing 23Mbps.
I'll check this against the bill when I can get into her account - I'm locked out for 20mins because her password didn't work!
I'm on her laptop again now and have done the speedtest command again:
Download: 23.52 Mbit/s
Upload: 11.75 Mbit/s
... which agrees with the broadband speed checker, which this morning is showing 23Mbps.
I'll check this against the bill when I can get into her account - I'm locked out for 20mins because her password didn't work!
24Mbps is very slow. I mean very, very slow, unacceptably slow for a modern internet connection. It should be at least 10 times that fast. Trying to use more than one device on that connection will be unbearable. I still remember when 300 baud on a phone line was fast, but that was 40 or so years ago. Even an older DSL connection should be faster than 24Mbps. The thing that's wasting her money may be the internet connection.
CaffeineAddict
Well-Known Member
I don't know in which mega city do you live but for majority of this planet below 50 Mbps is still normal.
Even people in UK and many other western countries have such speeds, and UK isn't Afganistan.
OP
Beachcomber
Member
I'm in the north of Scotland, so we have pretty low expectations honestly! My last house was right up in the far north west, very rural and far from the telephone exchange, and I had 1Mbps on a good day!
We've actually been trying all day to log in to BT to see a bill, and we can't get signed in. We've tried various devices and changed passwords, and we still can't get in. The hub's been playing up a bit too, so maybe BT are having some issues.
Anyway, mum's computer is working at a decent speed now, and I've managed the installation on my brother's too, which also seems to be running at a good speed.
So, thanks again everyone for all your help! I'd have absolutely no chance of doing technical things like this without you!
We've actually been trying all day to log in to BT to see a bill, and we can't get signed in. We've tried various devices and changed passwords, and we still can't get in. The hub's been playing up a bit too, so maybe BT are having some issues.
Anyway, mum's computer is working at a decent speed now, and I've managed the installation on my brother's too, which also seems to be running at a good speed.
So, thanks again everyone for all your help! I'd have absolutely no chance of doing technical things like this without you!
Even 4G is normally near 100Mbps, but can of course be lower depending on signal strength. The UK must be far behind the times if normal is only 50Mbps. Even the cheapest internet plans here guarantee 75Mbps, and usually exceed the guaranteed speed. My plan, in Texas, guarantees 1 Gbps, and my latest test showed 1329 Mbps. That's not the cheapest, nor is it the most expensive. I was getting well over 100 Mbps back in the days of DSL, many years ago. My daughter lives in Spain, and gets near what I do.
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I'll add a caveat to that one...
It REALLY matters where you live and who your network provider is. Where I live, you can barely get a couple of bars of service. If you use AT&T, you might not connect at all. The towers in the area are all US Cellular. AT&T and T-Mobile don't have towers anywhere near me.
Oddly, T-Mobile works better than Verizon or US Cellular (they more readily share towers with an agreement between them.
Then, you might get 5 to 7 Mbps on a good day... US Cellular, the owner of the tower, might get 1.2 Mb/sec.
My DSL provider screwed me over pretty hard.
I got satellite, but Starlink didn't serve my area, so I saved much of the bandwidth for the missus.
I then used a cellphone hotspot as my only real ISP.
The good news is that I have had a T-Mobile plan for a long time. They had a sale where they offered 'unlimited hotspot data'. They still honor that because I've never changed my plan with them. Their support workers have told me to keep my account and never change because it'll take away my unlimited hotspot data.
To be fair to T-Mobile, it's not really their fault. When they offered 'unlimited bandwidth', nobody was using more than a couple of people were using more than a few hundred MB per month.
They've done some limiting to it over the years. File sharing via torrents won't work. You can't use the Tor network. Really large files (over a GB) tend to fail.
Other than that, a mobile hotspot was what I used for about 1.5 years (waiting for fiber internet for much of that time).
And, kudos on T-Mobile for honoring my contract for this long. I'm well and truly impressed, as I'd burn though 300 to 400 FB of traffic in a month.
I have a 5G phone, but at home, in a close-in suburb of a very large city, I'm lucky to get two bars at any time. It has been like this since cellphones became a thing. I'm not sure of the exact cause, since I can go down the street a few blocks and get a strong signal. I'm just in a dead spot. But even with one bar, I can get usable speeds with my phone as a hotspot. I've had to do this a few times when the power went out and I wanted to use my laptop. I'm hopeless at typing on a phone's virtual keyboard. I hate doing that.
But yes, location matters with cell speeds, as does provider. ATT gives me unlimited data both on the phone and when using the hotspot, but threatens to slow the speeds by a lot if I go over their limit, whatever it is. I don't use the phone as a hotspot often. If necessary, I can use my wife's phone for that. AFAIK each phone on my family plan gets its own allowance.
But yes, location matters with cell speeds, as does provider. ATT gives me unlimited data both on the phone and when using the hotspot, but threatens to slow the speeds by a lot if I go over their limit, whatever it is. I don't use the phone as a hotspot often. If necessary, I can use my wife's phone for that. AFAIK each phone on my family plan gets its own allowance.
LOL I can drive in 15 minutes and not get another cell signal for the next 30 minutes of driving.
Things like that make me especially appreciate fiber optic internet. Well,,I should probably use the abbreviation of FTTH,
I did have to pay to get fiber run up the private road we're on. One of the 'neighbors' chipped in, but couldn't do much. Another was in no position to help. So, it was expensive.
But it was worth every penny! It was actually less than it cost to get upgraded lines that'd support DSL.
Frankly, I was content with DSL. It was fast enough to watch 1080i videos while downloading larger files. It didn't really matter how long files took to download at that speed. It was 'fast enough'.
But, yeah, fiber is so much more awesome.
Youtube 1080p stream uses like 5-10 Mbps. So his internet is just fine for that. Your comment did not bring OP any closer to a resolution but sparked massive offtop instead.
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but sparked massive offtop instead.
Yeah, that happens from time to time.
Or, alternatively, what he said...
This may be the first time an internet thread has ever gone off topic!
Our off-topic stuff is usually after OP has been helped, while waiting for them to reply, or on tangents that explore different things entirely. It happens.
If only we had a staff member who'd step in and keep us in line!
I have a 5500, not a 5495, but they are close. Linux, wi-fi and all works great.
Complete!
root@dellLat5500:~# fastfetch
__wgliliiligw_, root@dellLat5500
_williiiiiiliilililw, ----------------
%iiiiiilililiiiiiiiiiii OS: Rocky Linux 10.1 (Red Quartz) x86_64
.Qliiiililiiiiiiililililiilm. Host: Latitude 5500
_iiiiiliiiiiililiiiiiiiiiiliil, Kernel: Linux 6.19.12-1.el10.elrepo.x86_64
.lililiiilililiiiilililililiiiii, Uptime: 22 days, 22 hours, 20 mins
_liiiiiiliiiiiiiliiiiiF{iiiiiilili, Packages: 882 (rpm)
jliililiiilililiiili@` ~ililiiiiiL Shell: bash 5.2.26
iiiliiiiliiiiiiili>` ~liililii Display (LGD05FF): 1920x1080 in 16", 60 Hz [Built-in]
liliiiliiilililii` -9liiiil Terminal: /dev/pts/1 9.9p1
iiiiiliiliiiiii~ "4lili CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8665U (8) @ 4.80 GHz
4ililiiiiilil~| -w, )4lf GPU: Intel UHD Graphics 620 @ 1.15 GHz [Integrated]
-liiiiililiF' _liig, )' Memory: 777.43 MiB / 15.18 GiB (5%)
)iiiliii@` _QIililig, Swap: 0 B / 2.00 GiB (0%)
)iiii>` .Qliliiiililw Disk (/): 3.57 GiB / 34.94 GiB (10%) - xfs
)<>~ .mliiiiiliiiiiil, Disk (/home): 7.78 GiB / 404.80 GiB (2%) - xfs
_gllilililiililii~ Disk (/var): 669.60 MiB / 24.94 GiB (3%) - xfs
giliiiiiiiiiiiiT` Local IP (eno2): 192.168.12.65/24
-^~$ililili@~~' Battery (DELL C5GV285): 100% [AC Connected]
Locale: en_US.UTF-8
root@dellLat5500:~#
hardware is very similar
root@dellLat5500:~# lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Coffee Lake HOST and DRAM Controller (rev 0c)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation WhiskeyLake-U GT2 [UHD Graphics 620] (rev 02)
00:04.0 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v5/E3-1500 v5/6th Gen Core Processor Thermal Subsystem (rev 0c)
00:08.0 System peripheral: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v5/v6 / E3-1500 v5 / 6th/7th/8th Gen Core Processor Gaussian Mixture Model
00:12.0 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Point-LP Thermal Controller (rev 30)
00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Point-LP USB 3.1 xHCI Controller (rev 30)
00:14.2 RAM memory: Intel Corporation Cannon Point-LP Shared SRAM (rev 30)
00:14.3 Network controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Point-LP CNVi [Wireless-AC] (rev 30)
00:15.0 Serial bus controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Point-LP Serial IO I2C Controller #0 (rev 30)
00:15.1 Serial bus controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Point-LP Serial IO I2C Controller #1 (rev 30)
00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Point-LP MEI Controller #1 (rev 30)
00:16.3 Serial controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Point-LP Keyboard and Text (KT) Redirection (rev 30)
00:17.0 SATA controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Point-LP SATA Controller [AHCI Mode] (rev 30)
00:19.0 Serial bus controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Point-LP Serial IO I2C Host Controller (rev 30)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Cannon Point PCI Express Root Port #8 (rev f0)
00:1d.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Cannon Point-LP PCI Express Root Port #13 (rev f0)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Cannon Point-LP LPC Controller (rev 30)
00:1f.3 Audio device: Intel Corporation Cannon Point-LP High Definition Audio Controller (rev 30)
00:1f.4 SMBus: Intel Corporation Cannon Point-LP SMBus Controller (rev 30)
00:1f.5 Serial bus controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Point-LP SPI Controller (rev 30)
00:1f.6 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation Ethernet Connection (6) I219-LM (rev 30)
01:00.0 Unassigned class [ff00]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTS525A PCI Express Card Reader (rev 01)
02:00.0 Non-Volatile memory controller: Sandisk Corp PC SN520 x2 M.2 2230 NVMe SSD (rev 01)
root@dellLat5500:~#
Complete!
root@dellLat5500:~# fastfetch
__wgliliiligw_, root@dellLat5500
_williiiiiiliilililw, ----------------
%iiiiiilililiiiiiiiiiii OS: Rocky Linux 10.1 (Red Quartz) x86_64
.Qliiiililiiiiiiililililiilm. Host: Latitude 5500
_iiiiiliiiiiililiiiiiiiiiiliil, Kernel: Linux 6.19.12-1.el10.elrepo.x86_64
.lililiiilililiiiilililililiiiii, Uptime: 22 days, 22 hours, 20 mins
_liiiiiiliiiiiiiliiiiiF{iiiiiilili, Packages: 882 (rpm)
jliililiiilililiiili@` ~ililiiiiiL Shell: bash 5.2.26
iiiliiiiliiiiiiili>` ~liililii Display (LGD05FF): 1920x1080 in 16", 60 Hz [Built-in]
liliiiliiilililii` -9liiiil Terminal: /dev/pts/1 9.9p1
iiiiiliiliiiiii~ "4lili CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8665U (8) @ 4.80 GHz
4ililiiiiilil~| -w, )4lf GPU: Intel UHD Graphics 620 @ 1.15 GHz [Integrated]
-liiiiililiF' _liig, )' Memory: 777.43 MiB / 15.18 GiB (5%)
)iiiliii@` _QIililig, Swap: 0 B / 2.00 GiB (0%)
)iiii>` .Qliliiiililw Disk (/): 3.57 GiB / 34.94 GiB (10%) - xfs
)<>~ .mliiiiiliiiiiil, Disk (/home): 7.78 GiB / 404.80 GiB (2%) - xfs
_gllilililiililii~ Disk (/var): 669.60 MiB / 24.94 GiB (3%) - xfs
giliiiiiiiiiiiiT` Local IP (eno2): 192.168.12.65/24
-^~$ililili@~~' Battery (DELL C5GV285): 100% [AC Connected]
Locale: en_US.UTF-8
root@dellLat5500:~#
hardware is very similar
root@dellLat5500:~# lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Coffee Lake HOST and DRAM Controller (rev 0c)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation WhiskeyLake-U GT2 [UHD Graphics 620] (rev 02)
00:04.0 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v5/E3-1500 v5/6th Gen Core Processor Thermal Subsystem (rev 0c)
00:08.0 System peripheral: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v5/v6 / E3-1500 v5 / 6th/7th/8th Gen Core Processor Gaussian Mixture Model
00:12.0 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Point-LP Thermal Controller (rev 30)
00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Point-LP USB 3.1 xHCI Controller (rev 30)
00:14.2 RAM memory: Intel Corporation Cannon Point-LP Shared SRAM (rev 30)
00:14.3 Network controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Point-LP CNVi [Wireless-AC] (rev 30)
00:15.0 Serial bus controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Point-LP Serial IO I2C Controller #0 (rev 30)
00:15.1 Serial bus controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Point-LP Serial IO I2C Controller #1 (rev 30)
00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Point-LP MEI Controller #1 (rev 30)
00:16.3 Serial controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Point-LP Keyboard and Text (KT) Redirection (rev 30)
00:17.0 SATA controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Point-LP SATA Controller [AHCI Mode] (rev 30)
00:19.0 Serial bus controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Point-LP Serial IO I2C Host Controller (rev 30)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Cannon Point PCI Express Root Port #8 (rev f0)
00:1d.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Cannon Point-LP PCI Express Root Port #13 (rev f0)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Cannon Point-LP LPC Controller (rev 30)
00:1f.3 Audio device: Intel Corporation Cannon Point-LP High Definition Audio Controller (rev 30)
00:1f.4 SMBus: Intel Corporation Cannon Point-LP SMBus Controller (rev 30)
00:1f.5 Serial bus controller: Intel Corporation Cannon Point-LP SPI Controller (rev 30)
00:1f.6 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation Ethernet Connection (6) I219-LM (rev 30)
01:00.0 Unassigned class [ff00]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTS525A PCI Express Card Reader (rev 01)
02:00.0 Non-Volatile memory controller: Sandisk Corp PC SN520 x2 M.2 2230 NVMe SSD (rev 01)
root@dellLat5500:~#
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