Re: Advice needed to speed up very slow machine (conclusion)
On Sunday 26 September 2004 09:11 am, Don Jackson wrote:
> 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
Here's an update for anyone interested...
Tried adding swap partition to hdc, made almost no difference for most times.
Left machine that way.
Went from Kmail to Sylpheed-Claws (ver. 0.9.12a). This reduced startup time
(of the email application) from well over 1 minute to about 12-15 seconds.
Very acceptable to my user. In process, found toolbar nicely configurable
for the user, eliminating things she didn't need and slightly re-titling
other icons. All is well for email with exception of a small printing
problem for a few isolated emails.
The original Mozilla-Firefox browser takes well over 1 minute to start up
(nearly 2 minutes sometimes), but it does a good job. I kept it for her as
an alternate, but decided to try Dillo as a faster startup browser for her
occasional use. Dillo starts up in about 15 seconds, but does not render
some web pages well (for instance www.wunderground.com).
Since I managed to convert all her saved Outlook Express and Kmail email to
Sylpheed-Claws, I gladly removed OE from the Win98 portion of her computer,
but still has dual booting capability since there are a few games under Win98
that her husband likes to play. (They do not work under Wine).
I'm sure I could make more speedup by going to different wm, but could not
justify the time needed for my learning curve. Just changing to S-C and
Dillo seemed good enough for her, as unlike me, she has never been exposed to
faster computers.
Revised computer has been back in her hands for some time now and performing
well with the exception mentioned about printing of a couple email files. I
need to look into them and possibly report a bug. Still get bugged with
phone calls as my written instructions to her were not perfect ... but
getting there!
Thanks all for the comments and suggestions. I'm sure my "client" thanks you
too. Linux, Debian, and all the others who contributed to open source
software have given this lady her "window to the world" in her meager mobile
home in the backwoods environment.
Don
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