[ltp] "Light" applications for a laptop

[Charles E Taylor IV]

On Wed, 11 Feb 2004 11:44:06 -0600
Luis Lebron <lr.lebron@comcast.net> wrote:

> I am currently running RedHat 9 on a 770  thinkpad (233Mhz, 96Mb ram).  
> Eventhough it works certain applications  are  extremely  slow.  For 
> example, it  takes  a very long time to start  OpenOffice,  Jedit, or 
> Quanta. I am looking  for  suggestion  on  applications that  would work

1) Get more RAM.  That 770 of yours should support at least 256MB (The
770X and 770Z appear to support 320M).  96M is just not enough to run a
bunch of "modern" applications.

2) Upgrade your hard drive to a faster model.  A more modern drive
(say, one of Hitachi's 5400RPM 40G models, available for $100 or so) will
half the loading times of your applicatios.   I put one in a 366 MHz
Thinkpad 240 and it felt like a whole new machine.  Plus, it made the
machine whisper-quiet.  Unless the fan's on, you don't hear it at all.

If you're going to stck with the default Red Hat 9 setup and 96M RAM, one
thing I would suggest is that you disable Nautilus.  This will speed up
your system noticably, as Nautilus is a bit of a RAM/CPU hog.  Also, there
are some services (sendmail, etc.) that RH9 has around by default that you
probably don't need.

-- 
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*  Charles Taylor <tomalek@mindspring.com>
*  Chemistry teacher, Linux enthusiast!
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*  Web: http://home.mindspring.com/~charletiv/
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