On Sat, 25 Sep 2004 21:45:10 -0500 Don Jackson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I am seeking the advice of some of you who may have been down this > path before. Situation: I am working on an older 166 MHz Pentium-S > machine with 96 MB RAM, two 2.5GB hard drives, for a neighbor (rather > poor) here in the Arkansas Ozarks. She will be using it mainly for > Email, web surfing, and possibly a few games. She is somewhat used to > Win98 and Outlook Express, but since I keep getting phone calls from > her every time W hiccups, I decided to rebuild this older computer for > her and put Debian GNU/Linux Sarge on it, figuring it might be less > work for me in "service calls" ;-) > > I have installed sarge with kernel 2.4.26 on it -- no problem. > Actually, everything works fine on it, with KDE and Kmail and > Mozilla-Firefox as my choices (since that's what I'm using myself). > The problem is that with only a 166 MHz processor speed and the > limited 96MB of RAM, the machine is agonizingly sloooooow! (I'm > spoiled by my own new 2.8GHz P4 with 1GB RAM) For example, it takes > about 4-1/2 minutes for cold boot up to the KDE desktop. I almost > fall asleep every time I wait for Kmail to come up, and the same for > the address book. Once Kmail is up and running, it's response is > satisfactory. > > I feel she needs to have a GUI interface for her email, etc. since > that is what she is used to. She is not very computer literate and I > need to make it as easy as possible for her to operate (she's had some > brain damage from an accident some years ago). > > Anyone have any suggestions of what I could do to improve speed within > the constraints I have mentioned? (Yes, I know that command line > email program would do wonders, but she needs the GUI.) I don't > really need all the fancy stuff that the KDE desktop provides. I > might mention that Win98se with Outlook Express is quite fast > (relative to sarge/kde/kmail) on this same machine. > > Thanks for any suggestion you might make... Hello, That's not quite as bad as a 133Mhz laptop w/16MB of ram. :-) For serious suggestions, I would start by using IceWM instead of KDE. The interface looks a lot like Win95 or 98 (assuming you use the right theme) and it's much lighter on the bloatware scale than KDE. You might find Thunderbird to be a better e-mail match, since you already have Firefox on her machine. Even better would be Sylpheed (or Sylpheed-claws), which is a very fast, lightweight alternative that has a similar look and feel to Outlook. (Not the close relative to Firefox any more, but still a great mailer.) For games, well there's always stuff like circuslinux, 'apt-cache search tetris', etc. Plenty of card games and such, too. And, of course, even though you use a different window manager it doesn't mean you can't run kde or gnome programs. They'll still work fine, provided you have the necessary libraries and dependencies installed (apt-get will take care of that, no sweat). HTH, Jacob -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
