Re: Minimal configuration for a laptop
On Sat, 24 Jan 2015, Selim T. Erdoğan wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 05:54:17PM -0800, Patrick Bartek wrote:
> > On Fri, 23 Jan 2015, Selim T. Erdoğan wrote:
> >
> > > I also got a second-hand Thinkpad last month, a T400, and I love
> > > it too. I think it's from 2009 or 2010.
> > >
> > > Mine has an Intel core 2 duo CPU (P8400 @ 2.26GHz) and 4GB ram,
> > > but a slightly slower CPU and 2GB of ram would also be fine for
> > > web browsing and office stuff. However, I don't know how much
> > > memory freemind or other electronic design software uses, so I
> > > would recommend getting 4GB if you can. (The T400 is upgradable
> > > to 8GB. You might want to check the maximum memory capacity on
> > > laptops you're considering.)
> > >
> > > (BTW, for office and the web, even 1GB might work but it may be a
> > > little tight. Myolder laptop had 1GB ram and it didn't run out
> > > of memory often --- only when I had very many tabs open --- but
> > > the single-core Amd athlon xp 2200 @ 1.6GHz was slow. It was
> > > from 2004.)
>
> I agree with your comments below, about the desktop environment
> affecting how much ram is needed. I should have mentioned that what
> I wrote above was based on using MATE.
I wasn't finding fault with your recommendations, just clarifying based
on my experiences. Better to have more info than you need than not
enough. ;-) While I agree that MATE is a lighter weight environment
than the current GNOME, and probably GNOME2, too, it still is heavier
than XFCE, LXDE or a window manager.
Really, I've discovered through fooling around with TinyX, X is a
RAM hog, too, reardless of GUI. But what are you going to do? TinyX
really isn't suitable as a general X server. Even recompiling X
doesn't help much. It's just the nature of the beast. Fortunately, RAM
is cheap.
>
> > How much RAM is sufficient depends more on the desktop GUI. For
> > GNOME and KDE, I recommend 4GB at least. The system I'm using now
> > has gone through multiple upgrades (hardware and OSes) since I
> > built it in 2007 with a 2.0GHZ 64-bit single-core AMD CPU & 2 GB
> > RAM running Fedora 6, first 32-bit, then 64, and GNOME2. Even with
> > just a browser, file manager, and a few applets running, it could
> > be sluggish at times, particularly when accessing the menus.
> > Upgrading to 4GB RAM solved all that.
> >
> > However, if using XFCE or LXDE or just a window manager, 1 or 2 GB
> > RAM would be fine.
B
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