My linux system is too slow
 

I have installed Mandrake 9.2 in a Pentium 4 machine containing a
128 MB RAM.The motherboard is of celeron.
Again, i installed the Mandrake 9.2 in Pentium 3with Tomatos' motherboard.the other hardware of both the machine are same.

When I tested the performance , I found that the pentium 4 machine works very very slowly .Even to respond to a mouse click(say right click) it takes 25-30 seconds.

But hte pentium 3 machine was quiet fast.

what could be the cause of the slow performance in that pentium 4 machine? What should I do to cope with that problem?

thanks.

Hi and Welcome to the forums!

The slowdown on the P4 machine is either the amount of RAM (128 is a little too little today) or the graphics drivers. I'd bet on the amount of RAM. Did you create a swap partition?. Anyway, if I was you, I'd run something lighter as blackbox or fluxbox or even XFCE instead of KDE, which I believe is the one that you are using ^_^.

Try running "top" from the command line to see if there's any big processes using up the resources.

Also use hdparm to see if DMA is enabled, as this can slow your system right down too. . .

Yeah, I'd say your RAM is too little. You could also try to stop some of the processes that are running but you don't need. For example you could stop CUPS if you don't have a printer. Additionally you could stop httpd and mysqld if you don't want to run a web server.

Go to Panel Menu->System Settings->Server Settings->Services

I assume you work as a user and not root. Secondly, try using some light weight apps as was suggested above.

Run this as root and post the output, 128MB is not much but Mandrake 9.2 would come with a pretty old version of KDE and it shouldn't run that slow...

I ran MDK 9.2 on a penitum 1 (200 megahertz) and 64 MB of ram.

Needless to say, it was unbearable.