Re: Linux slower than 'doze!!!

Chris Whelan wrote: 
Martin Cheatle wrote:


Chris Whelan wrote:

Hi

I was given some fairly low-spec micro ATX boxes from a school upgrade.
They are 900MHz Celerons with onboard graphics and 64MB SDRAM. I pinched
a memory strip from every other one to give me 128MB, with 16MB reserved
for graphics.
I installed XPee on a couple of them for non-computer friends. Web
browsing, email and even Office 2000 apps all ran at an entirely usable
speed. One machine has Photoshop Elements 2 running on it and it is still
fast enough to not be frustrating.
Purely in the interests of research, I have just installed my favourite
distro, Xandros, on one of them. It is pretty much unusable! Even just
opening apps takes forever. The best comparison I have is Firefox as that
is on all the machines. It takes about double the time just to open on
the Linux box.
Several apps that I use on my everyday Linux machine (which is far from
top spec), have run so slowly on these machines that at times I have
thought they have crashed!
Would anyone have anticipated this or should I be looking for a problem?

TIA

Chris


I noticed that non of the other posts have mentioned looking at the
hardware as the cause. I have a machine which ran doze fine but linux
like a dog! It turned out to be address write contentions on the
processor for all the onboard devices!! When I disabled the onboard
devices things soon improved! Try this on your box.

Just out of intrest what is the chipset on these systems?


Regards
Marche1990



Thanks for your reply. I posted because I thought that there might be a
hardware issue.

These machines are Acer Power SX's. They use a SiS630 chipset. I tried to
run one with a PCI sound card (just because I had one), but I can't find
any way to disable any of the onboard devices. The BIOS is very basic to
say the least!

There is no AGP slot on the mobo andI don't have a PCI graphics card to
hand, so it looks like I'm stuffed to try much in the way of hardware
changes.

Chris

Chris,

Does the board have a network port? can you disable?
Try ramping down the amount of memory being used by the video card to 8Mb ?

If remeber my problem correctly I ended up using cheap PCI Network cards and no sound but it was a while ago and I was only developing a web Kiosk for a friends trade stall.

Regards
Marche1990
.

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