On Thu, 2002-02-14 at 21:50, Jeffrey Madore wrote: > > Greetings: > > I recently installed Mandrake 8.1 on my son's machine which consists of a > 120Mhz processor and 84meg of ram. It now operates deadly slow. My > understanding has been that one advantage of linux is that it runs fine on > older equipment ; that it doesn't require the horsepower, so to speak, that > other OS's like windows does. > > Prior to installing Linux on my son's machine he was running windows 95. That > moved right along. He likes linux but it is dreadfully slow. > > I am running a celeron @ 700Mhz with 512 Meg of ram. The speed is much better > but still slower than windows ME, which I migrated from.
As others have mentioned, KDE (and Gnome) can be a real resource hog. It's not that they are necessarily bloated, but they have a lot of functionality and eye candy that just uses power. Basically, these desktop environments are designed to be run on modern hardware. Using lighter window managers like BlackBox, XFCE, etc. will definitely help. The lightest wm is probably twm, but it is so ugly in its default setup that it will likely make your eyes bleed upon first viewing. Another thing to keep in mind is hardware driver support, especially for X. I have found that if I can find an optimal X server (approximately equivalent to a video driver) for my systems, they perform much better than using the "generic super vga 1024x768" X server. In fact, I would say performance/speed doubles or even triples with a good X server. Yet another issue can be if you have too many unnecessary services (especially network services, but possibly others) running. Use Mandrake Control Center to look at boot-time services, and determine which ones you really need and which ones you don't. Then, stop them on the spot and disable them from running at boot-up. I actually used to run RedHat 5.1 on an old 486 (100 MHz, so it was a "fast" 486) with 16 MB RAM. Using an older version of X (3.3.6 I think) and the AfterStep window manager, it was quite peppy -- waaaayyyyy faster than the Win95 that was installed when I got it. But that was an older distribution, *designed for older hardware* (at the time, the two would have been somewhat concurrent, so it wasn't really "old" hardware when RH 5.1 came out). If you really want to run Linux on that old box, try finding an older distribution releasr, like Mandrake 7.x or even an older RedHat 5.x release. You will notice a BIG difference. Finally, I've said this before and I'll say it again. The *anecdotal* evidence for Linux running faster than Windows is primarily taken from server performance, where Linux is run with no GUI (no X Windows) at all. If you take out X Windows, even an old 486 with 16 MB RAM will fly under Linux. In fact, my church uses a Pentium 166 with 256 MB RAM for a Linux Samba server (and a few other network services), and it runs great. I wouldn't even *think* of putting Windows NT on that old beast! Dave -- Beware the wrath of dragons, for you are crunchy, and good with ketchup.
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