[Coco] Another drive question

[David]

On Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 12:28:38AM -0500, KnudsenMJ at aol.com wrote:
> In a message dated 12/9/03 3:24:21 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
> davehazelton at access-4-free.com writes:
> 
> My first Linux box ws just like yours, only 20M of RAM, not 64.
> Ran Slackware vintage 1997.  I was amazed how fast X-Win ran on that burro.
> 
> However, the Gnome desktop GUI runs sluggish on my newer Linux box (screaming 
> Pentium 133 MHz, monster 64M RAM).  It isn't the graphics that slows it down 
> -- it seems to stop and think a lot before doing anything.  It does try too 
> hard to be pretty and animated, but it does have to compete for the eyes, 
> hearts, and minds of Mac and Windoze users.  --Mike K.

Mike, your symptoms sound much like those of my system.  Although your
CPU, like mine, is sort of underpowered, your main problem is your
memory.  I had 64M in mine and it, too, seemed to stop and think a lot.
What's happening is that some of the critical memory is getting put into
swap.  Mine would get to where it was totally unresponsive.  I upped my
memory to 80M and that made all the difference in the world.  It pretty
much eliminated the halts.  It still is no firebird by any stretch of
the imagination, but that extra 16M really helped.

Too, if you could eliminate as many processes as you could would help,
too.. I started out with Mandrake.  It got pretty sluggish.  I switched
to Debian with quite a bit less stuff installed and at the start, it was
pretty peppy for what it is.  However, after adding more and more stuff,
it's not as quick as it was when I first installed Debian.