Re: more RAM = more speed?

[Patrick Olson <compman@internetcds.com>]

Thanks for the reply.

> In your case of course, more memory would show *huge* speed increases. It
> looks like another 32 megs would stop the immediate swapping problem. If you
> want to run StarOffice, I imagine another 16 to 32 megs above that is
> required. I don't have star office installed myself, so I can't check for
> you. :( (one more week... :)

I have StarOffice on a very similar machine.  This is the report it
gives:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:         30264      29616        648      24884        128      17600
-/+ buffers/cache:      11888      18376
Swap:       128484       5192     123292

I got there by this:
1. boot Linux (was running DOS game, sorry)
2. log into xdm and start StarOffice
3. open a new (empty) text document
4. switch to tty1 and login to run free

It looks like StarOffice is quite a memory hog too.  It sounds like 64MB
is enough to make Netscape happy.  

Based on the free output above, do you think 96MB would be enough to keep
swapping to a minimum with StarOffice thrown in?  If you're not sure, I'd
be happy to wait a week or so until you have StarOffice installed. 

> If you can afford it, the new mobo+cpu+ram would probably be the right thing
> to do.

Actually, my crazy idea was running my existing CPU in a new board for a
while until I want to (and can afford to) upgrade it.  But unless the new
board has 3 ISA slots, I don't think I want to do that.  Adding a net
card, sound card and 56K modem to about $280 for the board, CPU and RAM is
a bit to much. 

Thank you,
Patrick Olson