Urza9814 Posted January 15, 2004 Report Share Posted January 15, 2004 aight, I have an old, old, old old, and did I mention old? 4 year old compaq presario, and, since I can never get on our new comp because my brothers on it, I installed linux on the compaq...and it's sooo slow...it's frozen twice in the past hour...even windows doesn't do that! anyways, what do I do? I know you can still DL 9.1...but shouldn't I get an older version? that doesn't seem like it'd be much older...and if I get more RAM, will that alone help? I've been thinking about that for a while (only have 64MB in that comp)...please help...I'm 'wishing' for the 'good ol' days' of windows 98!!! :o Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darkelve Posted January 15, 2004 Report Share Posted January 15, 2004 Well, a few suggestions of my part: - if you *can* upgrade the RAM, do it, but often you cannot since they do not make that breed of RAM anymore. I think you also have to have expansion slots for that - Go with another breed of Linux. Slackware or VectorLinux come to mind, but you can find lots of other distro's at www.distrowatch.com This one seems to be popular lately: http://www.distrowatch.com/table.php?distr...ution=damnsmall - Look what other people did; search in google or go here: http://www.linux-laptop.net/compaq.html - Use programs that do not take a lot of system resources, e.g. use AbiWord rather than OpenOffice or e.g. Rox rather than Konqueror - Ask for help on this board - Oops, DONE! :D Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
linux_learner Posted January 15, 2004 Report Share Posted January 15, 2004 i have an old, old, old, old computer to. it is also a compaq pressario. a compaq pressario 5000us. i run mandrake 9.2/10 cooker on it. some things to check. running services. shut down unnecessary services. i only have 73 services running. second thing to check is, it could be your hosts are configured. /etc/hosts (i think). local host should be there as well as your out side ip address and domain name. these two things will slow the pc down and cause instability. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CarlJF Posted January 15, 2004 Report Share Posted January 15, 2004 1) As said before, tried to remove all the services you don't need. 2) Have you tried diffrent GUI ? KDE isn't exactly a light environment and suck up a lot of power. Have tried GUI like Blackbox ? There's a lot of these GUI included with Mandrake, they can certainly run better and faster than KDE/Gnome on less powerful computer. 3) As others said, use the less demanding app. KOffice instead of OpenOffice, Firebird instead of Mozilla, etc... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chris z Posted January 15, 2004 Report Share Posted January 15, 2004 as Darkelve said.......... i would upgrade the RAM, & chances are excellent that you will see a significant speed increase. i currently am running MDK9.2 on a 9gig partition on a 5 year old IBM Aptiva with an AMD K6 333mhz cpu, & it runs fine. granted.......in all honesty, it's not as peppy as Win98 on the same computer & takes twice as long to boot, but the "peppy" part of it is negligible, as in a second or three slower for some things to load. put as much RAM in there that the computer will allow & that you can afford. (RAM is dirt cheap, especially for older computers such as yours & mine) one other thing..........how large is your /swap? did you set a /swap partition? if not, you need one. if you have one, it may be too small. i'd recommend a 500meg /swap, at least. that may sound excessive, but if you have the hdd space, better safe than sorry. Chris Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted January 15, 2004 Report Share Posted January 15, 2004 slackware? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mirrorshades Posted January 15, 2004 Report Share Posted January 15, 2004 I know you can still DL 9.1...but shouldn't I get an older version? that doesn't seem like it'd be much older. You don't need an older version. Case in point: I recently purchased an IBM ThinkPad 380ED (circa 1997) that boasts a Pentium 166 MHz processor and 80 MB of RAM. I installed 9.1 on it and am quite pleased with its performance. Main complaint is that it takes about 5 minutes to boot up and start the GUI... but once everything is up and running it's not really bad at all. I tried both IceWM and GNOME, and GNOME is just about as fast as IceWM. One of the cool things about linux is that, unlike windows, a newer version doesn't necessarily mean that you need to go buy beefier hardware to use it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Urza9814 Posted January 15, 2004 Author Report Share Posted January 15, 2004 How do you increase the swap? do I have to run the install again (I know I have one...not sure of it's size though) I don't want a new type of linux though if it can be avoided...but I can triple the RAM in this comp for just over $20...pricewatch.com...I need to get some cash from my mom...well, she's remodeling the kitchen...shouldn't be that hard :-P Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted January 15, 2004 Report Share Posted January 15, 2004 you either have to make a new bigger swap, or make another and give them a priority in /etc/fstab. SEE: man swapon Do you have unallocated space or a partition that can be eliminated/resized? Is this a linux only hd? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Urza9814 Posted January 16, 2004 Author Report Share Posted January 16, 2004 yes, this is a linux only harddrive...no empty space, but I suppose I could resize the root partition or, if safe, the /mnt/windows...but I don't think that is, is it? my swap is about 500MB right now though... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted January 16, 2004 Report Share Posted January 16, 2004 someone else will have to comment on the resize issue. I've always avoided it. What filesystems are / and /mnt/windows? So, you have 2 hd's? One lin, one win? Is your swap being used up? I'd imagine it is. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
polemicz Posted January 16, 2004 Report Share Posted January 16, 2004 ram, ram, ram. I use 9.2 without trouble on a 533 piii, but with 512 ram. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Urza9814 Posted January 16, 2004 Author Report Share Posted January 16, 2004 lol...ok, I'll look for RAM... I'm using different desktops now, right now on window maker (enlightenmint confused the hell outta me :-P) and it seems to be going a lot faster...but yea, I'll get some RAM soon...hope that helps...and until then...I guess I do everything by konsole (can't find anything else on this skin! :-P) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darkelve Posted January 16, 2004 Report Share Posted January 16, 2004 (edited) lol...ok, I'll look for RAM...I'm using different desktops now, right now on window maker (enlightenmint confused the hell outta me :-P) and it seems to be going a lot faster...but yea, I'll get some RAM soon...hope that helps...and until then...I guess I do everything by konsole (can't find anything else on this skin! :-P) Window Maker? Yeah, that's bound to give you better speed than KDE. Of all the WM's I tried though, XFCE4 was fastest. The main thing I love about WindowMaker and XFCE4, is the way they dock applications. Anyone know if this is possible in KDE?? Oh, and some advice: I noticed I only got Konsole installed, but when I had KDE problems obviously I booted into XFCE4 but could not use console, so had no CLI. So be sure you have at least 2 terminals (I recommend Xterm) installed. Could save you a lot of trouble. Edited January 16, 2004 by Darkelve Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted January 16, 2004 Report Share Posted January 16, 2004 aterm and rxvt are the lightest ;) ....and if mandrake is installed, rxvt is....it's a dependency for the drak stuff (Mandrake Control Center, or mcc) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.