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Re: Advice needed to speed up very slow machine



On Saturday 25 September 2004 09:45 pm, Don Jackson wrote:
> I am seeking the advice of some of you who may have been down this path
> before.  Situation: I am working on an older 166 MHz Pentium-S machine with
> 96 MB RAM, two 2.5GB hard drives, for a neighbor (rather poor) here in the
> Arkansas Ozarks.  She will be using it mainly for Email, web surfing, and

Thanks all for the suggestions and information.  Right now, I have the machine 
dual booting with sarge on hda (1st IDE) and win98se on hdc (2nd IDE).  There 
is unused partition on hdc which I can use for swap (currently swap is in 
partition on hda).  All comments on using alternate wm and application 
programs are  appreciated as I'm not too familiar with them.  Guess I will 
be.

The plan of attack for today is to change swap to hdc and then start trying 
alternate programs.  I'll do some (crude) benchmarks and report back to the 
list for anyone interested in results.  Adding to memory size is not an 
option at this moment.  Presently using (2) 32MB and (2) 16MB PC-100's and 
all slots filled.  Maybe can find a couple 32MB PC-100's to substitute for 
the 16MB to bring total RAM to 128MB (96MB presently).  Boot time is not as 
important as time for bringing up apps.

She uses dial-up modem connection, but I have placed an old NIC in the machine 
for when I use it at my home as I have ADSL, makes updating and trying out 
new programs a lot faster.

Don



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