[ltp] What is the fastest Thinkpad I can get now?

Robert Tomsick linux-thinkpad@linux-thinkpad.org
Tue, 23 Mar 2010 04:13:27 +0000


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On Mon, 2010-03-22 at 20:31 -0700, John Jason Jordan wrote:
> On Tue, 23 Mar 2010 03:49:22 +0100
> Karsten K=C3=B6nig <remur@gmx.net> dijo:
>=20
> >Am Dienstag, 23. M=C3=A4rz 2010 03:31:02 schrieb John Jason Jordan:
> >> It looks like a fully decked out W510 is what I need, although the
> >> Lenovo website fails to state what resolution the screen runs at and
> >> a bunch of other details.
> >
> >They somehow fail to tell what systems they actually sell, indicates
> >the stance Lenovo seems to be taking towards the Thinkpads =3D/
> >
> >> Here is an example of my problem: I am currently trying to print a
> >> PDF to a PS file from Evince. The PDF is 118 pages. I started it 15
> >> minutes ago and it has completed 15 pages. In that time one of the
> >> the CPUs or the other has been at close to 100% the whole time, but
> >> the disk light hardly ever comes on. The final file size will be <
> >> 200 MB, so you know it is not lagged from writing to disk. It is the
> >> CPU and RAM where the bottleneck lies. And I can't continue working
> >> on the project until Evince completes the PS file.
> >
> >Maybe it's a gtk problem? There is also okular, in case it's a poppler
> >problem this won't help but might start cornering the problem.
> >Or is printing to PS not the only sluggy part? Like anytime you touch
> >your projects the system crawls?
> >Maybe check with top or something more sophisticated like htop who is
> >eating all your system resources, maybe you have a noncooporating
> >task? Also for me a dying harddisk slowed certain disk accesses really
> >badly a few years ago, there were no real failures in the SMART log
> >but just switching worked wonders.
>=20
> I have half a dozen PDF viewers installed, including Okular. Okular is
> just about as slow as the others. It's not gtk, it's not Gnome, it's
> not Fedora 11. You put your finger on it when you said "anytime you
> touch your pojects the system crawls." Except the system is just as
> snappy as always - it's the app that I am using that crawls. All my
> apps are single-threaded, so they use only one core. The system runs
> just fine on the other one, so it is always responsive.
>=20
> It has always been thus. In the past I used Ubuntu; now Fedora. All
> these apps were just as slow on Ubuntu. It's just that lately my
> projects have been getting much larger. It's bad when I had to wait 15
> minutes to get output from a 20 page document. Now I am working on a
> 132 page document and it takes an hour and a half. Rendering graphics
> is just CPU/RAM intensive and there is no solution outside of faster
> hardware.=20
>=20
> I use the System Monitor in Gnome to see what is eating resources. I
> know exactly who the culprits are. And there are no alternative
> programs that run faster, that is, unless I go back to "that other OS."

What about pdf2ps?  No idea how it'll work for you performance-wise, but
I can't imagine it'll be any worse than using a GUI-based program to
"print" to a Postscript file.  Might be worth a shot if you haven't
already tried it.

-Rob

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