I am using Ubuntu 12.04LTS on my Toshiba satellite L510 and I have only Ubuntu installed. The system becomes slow and jerky by itself after every 10minutes or so and the remains like that for less than one minute
Ubuntu 12.04LTS becoms slow and jerky randomly for a mintue and then becomes normal by itself
performance;syslog
I had issues with (temporary) hanging/freezes/sluggishness on a (somewhat older) laptop that was (somewhat) resolved by using GNOME Classic (aka GNOME Fallback, & still is gnome3, btw); but my eventual solution was to use gnome2/mate (eventually replacing Ubuntu altogether with the Linux mint distro). Perhaps too much cruft from too many upgrades, or maybe the old laptop just couldn't handle the demands of unity/gnome3; I'm sure the situation will improve, but until then, cheers, mate.