Mandrake 10.1 is slow. Suggestions?

[Guest Tony Lintunen]

Hi. I just installed Mandrake 10.1 on this laptop:

 

http://www.toshiba.ca/web/product.grp?lg=e...p=223&product=4

 

Everything seems to be functioning but REALLY slowly. I only have 192 mb of ram in the machine, so I realize this could be contributing to the slowness. I'm also using KDE, so this might also be the problem because I've heard that KDE is "expensive".

 

Are there any other thoughts on what could be causing the slowdown and how I can speed things up?

 

Thanks,

 

Tony

[ianw1974]

You can disable a few services no doubt which will help. The other way of speeding things up is to use an alternative to Gnome/KDE, such as ICEWM, or any other Window Manager.

 

These use less memory. You could post a list if your services that are enabled, and I can then advise you which ones can be safely disabled.

[ilia_kr]

I also using MDK 10.1 on my pentium 3 550 mHz 192 mb ram PC, its slow indeed, so i think its a matter of RAM & CPU power amount.

[wilcal]

Are there any other thoughts on what could be causing

the slowdown and how I can speed things up? 

On one of my older machines ( P350, 192MB, 5GB HD )

I use Ubuntu 5.10. Do try Puppy Linux as it will

do most of the functions you are looking for

in well under 192MB of DRAM.

 

http://www.puppylinux.com

[Gowator]

Considering the RAM Im presuming its a laptop....

 

Obviously a lightweight WM like IceWM or similar will help a lot.

If its a laptop then a slow laptop disk and low RAM is even worse combo

 

and if its a SMA laptop using system mem then it mght not be properly supportted under Xorg. I have a klaptop with a S3 twister which has always been really poor in X because it falls back on the vesa driver.

[scarecrow]

KDE will be dog slow to anything less than 256M.

Gnome should be OK, but do yourself a favour and tryout XFCE4- superb lighweight desktop (= not just a window manager, like IceWM/Fluxbox), which leaves little or nothing to be desired (it can even run all Gnome and KDE apps, if needed).

Puppy, Damn Small, Vector standard, all these are fine for old, anhaemic machines, but Mandriva should be pretty fine too, as long as you don't ask too much from it (= running KDE, OpenOffice and other resources-heavy stuff).