[ltp] Re: 1GB in 1-slot T30 -- no bootie [SOLVED]

[Richard Neill]

Thomas Hood wrote:
> I found a solution to the no-boot problem.

Glad to hear it.
> 
> Now some comments about bloat.
> 
> When my second memory slot ceased to work and my memory dropped from 512 MiB
> to 256 MiB what I noticed was that my computer became very slow when running
> more than one office application.  Investigating, I started top and looked
> at the virtual memory usage.  Firefox and thunderbird were each using close
> to 200 MiB of memory!  Switching back and forth caused considerable disk
> access.   Starting OpenOffice.org on top of these two caused the machine to
> slow down to thrashing crawl.
> 
> I think it's a bit outrageous that these applications are using so much memory.
> It's not that long ago that I was running similar applications with no
> swapping in 128 MiB.
> 
> I switched to opera from firefox for regular browser use and that helped.
> Anyone have any suggestions for a less bloated MUA than Thunderbird but
> with comparable functionality?

I agree - it's horrendous. Especially since Fx,TB are supposed to be the 
"lightweight" alternatives to the mozilla suite!

Some thoughts:

Fx/TB leak memory horrendously. Fx does do far too much caching in RAM. 
Also some extensions are apparently "leaky". The good news is that the 
leaked memory is never used again - so you can swap it out with no 
performance hit. A large swap partition (or swap file?) will help.

The Mozilla suite is still around (as seamonkey) - and may be worth trying.

Also, konqueror is a really good browser. I think kmail might be worth 
trying, or evolution - I've heard good things about both.

For a lightening-quick browser, try links-graphic, or dillo.

OpenOffice v.2 is much faster than 000 v.1. However, using 
abiword/gnumeric is quicker for small jobs.

However, I totally agree - you simply cannot(*) run a laptop on less 
than 256 MB, and 2GB is not really sufficient for a desktop.  This is 
ludicrous when you consider what could be done with 640k (**)!

Regards,

Richard


(*)Yes, you can, but you loose a lot of functionality. icewm is pretty 
good though.

(**)Try menuetos, and be impressed!