Bob Hynes wrote:
> I have debian running on a 500Mhz box with 256MB ram. It's pretty
> slow...slower than windows would be. Is there anyone who know what I
> could be doing to speed things up? turning off services, adding ram? I'm
> also considering tying another version of Linux, but maybe this box is
> just too slow at 500Mhz?
Others have give you some good directions on where to look for
optimizations and I don't want to duplicate their excellent advice. I just
want to chime in with my experience.
For my desktop purposes I am running Debian on a PIII-667 Dell Latitude
CPx w/256Mb of RAM. My (lite) desktop environment of choice is XFCE4. I run
Thunderbird, Firefox, Gaim and VNC 24/7 with no problems with speed.
Furthermore I fire up Openoffice.org for editing on a personal writing
project. Again, no problems with with speed at all.
This has been my preferred workstation for going on 6 years. In that time
I have run some funky setups up to and including a dual-boot Win2k/Debian
setup with VMWare on both sides to boot into the other. IE, if I booted to
Win2k VMWare was running with Debian inside. I booted to Debian, VMWare was
running with Win2k inside. While it has been ages since I've had Win2k on
this machine I don't recall Win2k ever being faster than Debian.
I've never really felt the desire to upgrade this system in terms of
hardware in that time and doubt I will want to do so in the future. I don't
know what other aspects of your machine are outside of RAM/CPU but I don't
think the 166Mhz difference between my machine and yours would account for an
unusable drop in speed.
--
Steve C. Lamb | I'm your priest, I'm your shrink, I'm your
PGP Key: 8B6E99C5 | main connection to the switchboard of souls.
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