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

[John Jason Jordan]

On Tue, 23 Mar 2010 03:49:22 +0100
Karsten K=C3=B6nig <remur@gmx.net> dijo:

>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.

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.

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

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."