On Tue, Jun 21, 2005 at 06:13:35PM +0200, Benedek Frank wrote: > Hi > > I am seeking info from other people who has slow laptops, or just know how to > save memory and CPU usage on a Debian system. > > I am an owner of a Sony Vaio PCG-C1VRX/K laptop, that has a Transmeta Crusoe > 600MHZ CPU, which is very slow in nowdays, but I refuse to change it as I > love it. I have a Centrino DELL laptop, but I dont use that much, as I am > just inlove with this thing, however I need it to be faster. > > I have a 2.6.11 kernel. I saw a major slowdown from when I upgraded to 2.6 > kernel, from 2.4. Even disabling Discover, I now only have Hotplug, but boot > time is still around 3 minutes. That is to console. From there, I booted KDM > and KDE, and my full boot time was around 4 minutes and a little. > > I looked into smaller window managers, but finally I am using now XFCE, which > is ultra fast compare to KDE. I dont use KDM now anymore, I rather log in > with console and do a "startx" from there. > > However, still my boot time is unacceptable. Not even speaking when I try to > open Kmail or Openoffice, and Firefox. They take a loooooooong time to boot > up. > > Anybody has any more suggestions, how to make a speedy but usable Debian > laptop?
Running a lightweight window manager is absolutely a good idea if you want performance. I usually like to use openbox, though if you're happy with XFCE then by all means keep using it. How married are you to kmail? A console MUA would help in that case; I like mutt but there are others. Some people say they can browse the web just fine with console browsers most of the time (like the various lynx/links/elinks programs . . . I don't do that so I can't really say). How do you use openoffice? You may be able to avoid using that as well. There are utilities for converting word documents and the like to other formats; maybe those would serve. Also, if you need to write papers or other documents, there's always LaTeX. Finally, it's not just your machine; openoffice is just slow. Did you compile your own kernel? If you do so you can often remove things you don't need and the boot time will improve, I believe. This will likely take some research. You can also turn off services you don't use by editing the contents of /etc/init.d/. This will likely improve your boot time quite a bit depending on what you can do without. Could someone explain this further? I don't really know what I'm doing in this area. Is your laptop's suspend/resume working? If so, you can save boot time by not shutting down. :-] Max out your memory if you can. That improves performance too. These are most of the things I did with my Dell Latitude, which was a mighty 333 MHz. I used it for "everything" until last year when the screen finally crapped out, and it was certainly more than fast enough. Hope that helps. -T -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
