On Thu, 2002-11-21 at 10:40, Hal Watson wrote: > 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). I am big fan of Icewm and if you want speed on that 350, that was a good start. There are a few system tuning things you can do. Of course, more memory helps by reducing swapping. See if you can tune your IDE disk with hdparm (see "man hdparm"). You can set hdparm options easily in Red Hat using the /etc/sysconfig/harddisks file. Here are the two variables I set: USE_DMA=1 EIDE_32BIT=3 Also, in KDE, you can turn off a lot of the animations and full window dragging, etc. See KDE Control Center / Look & Feel / Launch Feedback, Window Behavior. I have found KDE3 requires as much firepower as Win2K/XP. If you want good KDE3 performance, you probably need to be above 800 Mhz with plenty of ram. Gnome2 needs as much or more. Generally, I use KDE because I like a lot of the bells and whistles and my system is fast enough. But when I want to get maximum work done, I fire up Icewm. Some of the monster apps like open office are going to load slowly in any environment. If you use them a lot, you might want to consider loading them once when you boot and not closing them (if you can spare the ram). You can find lean replacements for most apps if you look around. Best Regards, Keith -- LPIC-2, MCSE, N+ We drive on this highway of fire Got spam? Get spastic http://spastic.sourceforge.net -- Psyche-list mailing list Psyche-list@redhat.com https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/psyche-list
