Firstly i have a Compaq Presario 1200AP (Asia Pacific Version) Laptop

Specs: Pentium III 700mhz, VIA 686 Chipset, Compaq soft Modem, 8Mb Trident Cyberblade/i1 Graphics 14" LCD,128mb RAM, 10GB HDD, USB, 24x CD-ROM.

I am having trouble with any Linux distro on this machine.Currently running SuSe 9. It runs rather slow and tends to lag. I have Hdparm running and configured and my graphics is ok. but it takesa a ver very long time to run programs.

Can anyone help? Cause i use this machine for work.

and some games "DOOM"

1.Try turning off services you don't use.
2.What resolution are you running? The higher ones use more memory.
3. What size is your swap partition and is it active?
4. You might look into one of the lightweight window managers (blackbox etc.) KDE and Gnome use a lot of resources.
5. Check your power settings. Change them to full power and see if that helps. Some of the battery saving utilities can slow your machine down considerably. Also type df -m and see your disk usage. If your disk is close to being
full it can cause poor performance. That's all I can think of
hope it helps.

Thanks joe83 i will try.

- My res is 1024x768, is has to be this res because of the LCD

- My Swap size is 300mb

- I Also have 1 4.6gb FAT32 Partition with all my work in it. this is for compatability and security.

- i also have 1 2gb Fat32 with a ghost image on it for backup.

- Maybe this helps a little to. Because windows 2000 Flies like a rocket on this machine.

Any other suggestions joe83 will help. Maybe these can help you solve ny delema

Cheers

Looks like (if you're running a dual boot) that your disk is pretty well full. If so I'd try trimming some of the fat off and using blackbox instead of KDE / Gnome.

I am not using dual boot that partition is for documents and music and the like.

Black box wont boot just like xandros didnt,

You see myu monitor on any distro has a black bar of about 3 millimetres up the left hand side. I know how to fix this by setting the vga=0x0305 (1024x768) in lilo.conf or grub.conf. But black box on anyh distro and xandros dont boot after the console and freeze. This is why i use KDE.

I have now removed everything, Full format, After backup of course. I have reinstalled SuSE 9 with the following partitions.

- / Root 8.8GB
- Swap 500Mb
- KDE

And it still runs slow after tweaking of the services and i have 7.8GB FREE!!!

I may give up soon on SuSE 9. May be 9.1 but the last time i tried that my videocard was not picked up correctly.

Hmm that's puzzling. Try running top and see what processes are actually running and memory usage. Kill processes such as sendmail, cron and anything else not crucial to operation and see if that speeds things up.

I Killed some non-crucial processes and that seems to have sped it up somewhat. Only Slightly sluggish.

I now have a new problem though this isnt crucial or anythin but by splash screen seems to have dissappered and i want it back. I have checked the menu.lst file and splash is set to 'splash=silent' and the init tree say that it is enabled in the boot up sequecnce yet all i get is console during the boot sequence. This is also puzzling.

Sounds like somehow your runlevel got changed. The following is for slackware, not sure if Suse is the same so please check first!

Edit etc/inittab
runlevel =
0=halt
1=single user
2=unused
3=multiuser (slackware default, console)
4=X11 with KDM/GDM/XDM (This is probably what you want)
5=unused
6=reboot

I have tried the same types of settings as described in this thread with the exception of running blackbox. I have the latest fluxbox rpm and will try that. In addition to what has been mentioned here, I believe that the max amount of memory avail on this box is 192 MB. I have maxed this out. I do need to run Evolution as well as OO on this box without waiting 28 minutes from boot to desktop...

Thanks