Re: ThinkPad A31 Too Slow
On Sun, 13 Apr 2003 13:10:30 +0300
Aryan Ameri <a.ameri@linuxiran.org> wrote:
> A couple of months ago I bought a ThinkPad A 31, it's one of IBM's
> high end models, with a 1.8 Ghz Pentium4 M, and 256 MB of DDR RAM.
> However I am not quite happy with the performance that I am getting
> out of this system.
>
> The system's performance can't even compete with my desktop system,
> which is a Pentium III 600 Mhz with 128 MB SDRAM. This is my first
> notebook computer, before this I never owned a notebook, so I don't
> know, weather it is common for laptops to be so slow or not.
What application(s) do you notice the slow performance in? What OS and
applications are you running on your desktop PC when doing the
comparison.
My experience of laptops is that generally the hard disk is slow
compared to a desktop so if you do anything disk-intensive then it takes
longer.
Comparing performance, my laptop is an Athlon XP 1400 with 256Mb RAM and
the CPU performance is noticably better than my home PC (Athlon 750
768Mb RAM), or my work PC (Pentium 4 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM). The CPU performance
is noticable doing anything in Galeon or Mozilla, or working with audio
encoders etc.
> I have heard that Debian's default installation, is a safe one, which
> doesn't take advantage of many of the system's bells and whistles. I
> wonder, are there any things that I can do to somehow tweak my system,
> and make it faster? It seems to me that I am not getting the most out
> of my system.
I think most of debian's binary packages will work on any i386 family
processor so may not take advantage of all the bells and whistles of the
processor, but most people seem to think the difference in performance
is slight. In some cases though it does make a noticable difference and
for some packages there are versions optimised to use Pentium MMX
instructions or Athlon 3DNow.
For a notebook particularly, do you know if the processor speed is being
correctly controlled - i.e. the clock gets speeded up when you use the
processor and slows down when it's idle - called SpeedStep IIRC. When I
first got mine it ran the processor flat out all the time and I had to
enable APCI support in the kernel to get it to run cool and give decent
battery life.
HTH,
Steve.
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