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Hello,
I have a HP ze4435us model notebook and use Mandrake Linux 9.2. I my notebook has 512 MB, 2400+ AMD, 40 GB HD, DVD-CD-RW drive. I used the default partition settings during the installation. The problem is that my computer runs very slow. I can navigate the desktop ok, and once a program loads it runs decent. When loading a program, opening a window, booting the computer, and all that stuff it takes forever. I have a 1600+ AMD desktop, that is 2 years older, and it is running circles around this notebook. could someone tell me what I need to do to get this computer running at a decent speed? I have checked and the cpu is never running at 100%.
Could be the hard drives. Laptop hard drives are generally only 5200 rpm units at most, whereas desktop units can get up to 7200 for IDE or 15000 for SCSI. Sounds like this is the case, as you say programs run fine once they're loaded.
Is this a new laptop? Have you any other os on it? Ever? If so, how did or does it perform with the other os? Do a "ps ax" to see what is running and do a "free" and/or "top" to check memory usage. Watch what goes on during the boot. Does the system stall a long time on any particular load of daemons?
it was new as of this summer. It had windows xp pro on it, and ran like it should have. I ran the free command and said that the swap space was about 500 Mb in size, and that none of it was being used. Could that be a problem?
No, that only means it isn't using enough memory to require virtual memory, so that's good. Submit the results of "ps ax" and let's see what running processes you have.
It sounds like some conflict is going on with hardware. How did the Mandrake Linux install go? Did it stall at any point? You might want to have a look at /var/log/messages and see if there are any unusal things there.
I found this in the /var/logs/messages:
<i>modprobe: Can't locate module snd-card-X</i>
with X being a number one to seven
it was in the log a number of times.
I don't see anything unusual in your ps aux output, but I'm not an expert on that.
Do you notice that your machine gets progressively slower the longer it runs? That rebooting causes the machine to suddenly speed up? This could be caused by a memory leak.
Do you notice that your machine is accessing the HD all the time? This could be a faulty application logging too much. See how fast the size of /var/log is increasing. Also, see if the HD access is a result of swapping memory - low RAM could be the culprit.
Do you notice the computer is slowest when a certain program is running? Like, is there a big speed drop the moment you log into KDE? Could be a faulty app.
Make sure all your packages are up to date. This may resolve a bug that could be causing the slowness in one of the above three ways.
Somewhere in the past my Mandrake 9.x system behaved similarly to what you describe in your original message. There are probably many reasons for that behavior, but I noticed at that time that program startup speed was affected by the networking status (system would slow down after activating a network connection). The explanation was that KDE (or XFree86) needs to make a DNS lookup for localhost (127.0.0.1) whenever a new program or a new X window is opened. If for some reason the DNS configuration files don't list the local machine before any other DNS servers, KDE will, in a somewhat foolish way, ask first to the "foreign" DNS servers who or where is "localhost", and wait (perhaps 1 or more seconds over a Dial-up line) for the reply before it tries to find the very same info locally by asking the workstation (localhost) itself...
You may check the content of the file /etc/resolv.conf (should include the first line "nameserver 127.0.0.1" and also an additional line "searchhost local") and the file /etc/hosts which should list "127.0.0.1 localhost".
In konsole or xterm, try the commands "ping localhost" or "hostname" and see if they fail or are run slower than the expected fraction of a second.
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computer running slow
