Don Gould wrote:
I'd say that 128MB is just too little memory if you're going to try and run bloated programs like OO ( no, I am *not* knocking its functionality! ). VAIOs have run on slow P3s for a long time, and they seem to get a lot for their money out of it ( I'm talking M$ here - SWMBO wouldn't let me play with linux on it ).Performance of Ximian is very slow after the machine has been in screen saver mode.
Mozilla gets slower and slower to the point that I have to kill the process and run it again.
Graphics seem ok (thou all I'm doing is surfing and email on this machine).
OpenOffice just isn't worth the time of day to open.
I suspect the major issue is the disk and swap file. I've got Windows on the first pat followed by swap and linux (I think). Some times the machine just goes off and thinks for a while and I'm left to be entertained by the flashing disk light.
Cheers Don
On Tue, 2005-03-15 at 18:24, Don Gould wrote:
Thanks Nick,
It's my Sony VAIO laptop (128mb, 400mhz, p3, 8gb)
I was wondering if there were any wizzie apps that you can run that look at your hardware and configuration then make recommendations (I know there are plenty of these for Windows).
Thanks for your suggestions and recommendations. I have also been looking at some performance tuning stuff at www.faqs.org/docs/securing/gen-optim.html which seems to be useful.
Cheers Don
On Tue, 2005-03-15 at 12:07, Nick Rout wrote:
More RAM?
Actually your question is pretty hard to answer, we don't know what areas of performance you think are below par. It would also help to know about your hardware. Therefore the following os pretty generalised.
You should minimise the number of services operating - most of them will not be needed on a home LAN. They all take up ram and cpu cycles.
You could try running a less power crazed desktop - mandrake's default is kde, I am liking XFCE4, icewm is very accessible to windows people (a similar interface). Fluxbox is very light but more learning required. WindowMaker is good but ditto on learning curve.
If video performance is lacking, make sure you have the very best drivers for your card, eg if its an nvidia go for the proprietary nvidia drivers.
Mandrake is compiled for the 586 architecture IIRC. You could recompile the entire distro for your architecture [1], but it probably isn't worth the effort.
[1] I read an online article about how to do this for redhat once,was written by a kiwi too. mandrake would be similar as it has very similar structure and is rpm based. Basically it comes down to setting up custom RPM compiler settings, and rebuilding from source rpms. Actually if you wanted to take that approach gentoo probably makes it easier.
On Mon, 14 Mar 2005 21:06:38 +1300 Don Gould wrote:
Are there any tools for improving performance?
I've done a google but couldn't find much in the way of useful links.
Any recommendations?
Cheers Don
I reallydon't think you'll get much extra out of tuning a kernel - I'd use top in the first instance to monitor things like swap usage, and then resort to vmstat/iostat etc to get a firmer picture.
hth,
Steve
