Re: Advice needed to speed up very slow machine
Second Jacob's recommendation to swap icewm in for KDE. I disagree with him
that you can still run KDE apps -- it'll work, but you end up loading all
the QT and KDE libraries, meaning swapping ... meaning slowness.
If you're going to use GNOME products like Firefox, don't mix them with KDE
products. You end up needing BOTH sets of libraries, meaning INCREDIBLE
amounts of swapping.
I'd recommend trying Epiphany vs. Firefox. Most of the features, and
lighter. I have little experience with graphical mailers because mutt does
everything I need and it's lightning-fast.
The standard advice to speed up slow computers is "don't run anything at all
you can avoid". Check top or ps, see what's running, and decide if your
neighbor can do without it. For instance, you can probably skip running
Exim, installed by default in many configurations. Similarly, Samba is
probably not needed. I would check "dpkg --get-selections | grep -v
deinstal" to find what packages are installed and remove the ones not
actually wanted.
I assume you have swap partitions on both hard disks? And both hard disks
on different IDE buses? With limited RAM some swapping is going to be
inevitable, and this will give you the fastest swapping possible.
You might put dillo on there and advise your friend to use it whenever she
(?) doesn't need advanced web features. It's incredibly fast and small, and
if it works for the site in question it'll be hard to beat.
--
Carl Fink carl@fink.to
Jabootu's Minister of Proofreading
http://www.jabootu.com
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