Since I know three of my four RAM slots are dead and I'm down to roughly 880 MB of memory (until my new motherboard gets here), I've blamed low RAM whenever my system slows to a crawl. Then I paid attention to the system load monitor on the IceWM panel for the first time, and noticed that whenever it turns red because the system's nearly frozen, it also displays a higher number for the CPU load. Is that normal whenever I'm doing more than the low RAM can handle, or could it possibly indicate mean the CPU's also shot? I hope the latter, because I selected a new motherboard under the assumption that nothing's wrong with my CPU (I saw no evidence) and I could reuse it in the new board.

You can test the CPU specifically using:
http://www.mersenne.org/freesoft/#source
in mode 1.

However, it still uses some RAM, so it is best to have good RAM.

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With only 880Mb of RAM available I'd reckon that the CPU is being hammered with swapping data in and out of RAM. Does your hard disk show a lot of activity when the CPU shows heavy loading?

Play Bonny!

I'm not sure where to look to determine that, but perhaps I should mention that I've been running my system off liveCDs and liveUSBs recently (haven't got a hard drive) and have no separate swap space (and even when I did, there seemed to be a problem with the system accessing it or knowing it was available).

So you've got low memory and you're running from a live CD or USB stick? Live systems use ram disks so you're actually running a system with even less available memory! The CPU, in my humble estimation, is therefore flailing about wildly trying to keep whatever application you're running with hee-haw memory to play with and hence showing heavy loading! You've already diagnosed the problem as lack of memory, the CPU's fine.

My

Play Bonny!



Note: hee-haw is alternative Scots for nae or b*gger-all.

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