Hi all, I'm new to linux. I thought I would install Redhat 8.0 on my windows PC and see what all the fuss was about. I'm thinking maybe I can eventually replace my aging Windows 98 setup. So I threw in a second hard drive and am now dual-booting with Win 98. So far so good, my family is not affected and I'm learning a lot about linux. Maybe someday I will retire the Windows drive.... My hardware is a Pentium II - 350, with 128mb ram. My video card is nothing special, maybe 8mb ram. The default Gnome setup seemed kinda slow - so I gave KDE a try and that definitely seems faster on my machine and coming from my background it feels a little easier to use as well. But I'm not satisfied yet. Compared to the Win98 experience, I feel like I'm jogging with a 50 pound backpack. I can do it but it doesn't stay fun for long. The sluggishness I'm talking about is just an overall user-experience type. Apps take longer to load than I would expect (certainly much longer than in Win98). I'm speaking here both about OS oriented apps and general purpose apps like open-office and konquerer. A click on the redhat menu icon takes a longer than I think it should to display my list of programs ... you get the idea In my putzing around with this I've also installed IceWM to see if that will speed up my experience. It does seem noticeably faster, but there is definitely a learning curve involved with this approach, and re-building my KDE desktop from scratch in another window manager is not something I'm excited about. I'm wondering what my next step should be - It would be fairly easy and not too expensive to drop another 128mb ram into this machine. Will KDE (or Gnome for that matter) and the underlying OS take advantage of this extra ram? Would more ram, combined with using leaner applications do the trick? Or should I head down the IceWM road and see where that leads? Or would a new video card help (I don't do 3D or any gaming). Looking foward to hearing your suggestions. If more info would help let me know what it is you need to know. - Hal -- Psyche-list mailing list Psyche-list@redhat.com https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/psyche-list
