[Coco] Another drive question

[David]

On Thu, Dec 11, 2003 at 11:53:38AM -0500, KnudsenMJ at aol.com wrote:
> In a message dated 12/10/03 6:08:33 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
> dbree at duo-county.com writes:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> Thanks for the tip.  My current Linux box was originally 32M, but I stole the 
> SIMM out of another box to double it.

I have to make a correction - mine wasn't 64M, it was 32 (4x8) and I
replaced two 8's with 32's.

If your system uses the 168(?) pin simms, they might not be so
expensive, and if you only had to use 1, that may be what you have.
Mine uses the 72-pin simms (must be in pairs), and they _are_ expensive.

> Nowadays I'd probably have to look 
> hard and pay extra bucks for a RAM old enough to work in this machine, but it 
> sounds like another 32M would really help things out.

If you are acquainted with someone that works on computers, perhaps they
might have some old simms lying around that they would give you or sell
cheaply.

> >  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.
> 
> There is a lot of networking and other background stuff in a default Linux 
> installation that I could probably figure out how to shut down.  Also the print 

If you're running RedHat or one of its derivatives, you usually just
delete the symlink in the rc?.d files.  I think they have a command
"chkconfig" that allows you to manage these.

> daemon, until I move my HP DeskJet 500 to the Linux box.
> 
> I forget now whether it's my current box, but one of my Linux PCs had a 
> separate, small HD used for /swap space.  --Mike K.

They say that helps, but when frequently-used memory begins to be
swapped onto the HD, it has to slow things down.