For kicks i went out yesterday and bought a used inhouse computer from microcenter they were selling. For 30 bucks I got a pentium 1 system 166 mhz, 64m of ram, 5400 rpm 3 gig hard drive and a cdrom that runs a 6x. I plan to install linux on it and maybe use it as a server or just network it for practice. A couple of questions.

1) If I buy a speedier cdrom drive, say 52x or 56x, will the system be able to utilize all the power of the new cdrom?

2) I may buy a new hard drive for it that runs at 7200 rpm, but I have the same question as above, but for hard drives.

3) Does anyone have any miscellaneous tips on how to increase the speed of these types of systems (other than more RAM or over clocking)?

Thanks,
Poorman

I've got a very similar computer to what you just bought that I am using as a mini server, so I'm in the same boat as you. A lot of the answers depend on your motherboard (how new/old it is).

A couple of ways to dramatically improve performance is to get rid of simms and install dimms if your motherboard supports them. Dimms are far faster even in older computers.

If your system supports dimms it likely also supports dma/33 which *really* helps performance of your hard drive. It can make the difference of 8mb/sec to 22mb/sec. If you don't have a dma/33 controller you can purchase addon cards on ebay (I have a promise dma/33 controller that I love).

If you're going to be setting this system up as a server, I don't suggest upgrading to a new cdrom unless you're going to be using the cdrom to read a lot of data multiple times a day. I rarely use mine (a 4x) but it works just fine. Another solution might be to share a faster cdrom over NFS/samba and just use that to transfer data.

Another suggestion would be to track down the bios manual for your particular motherboard and optimize the settings there. This can often result in a noticable performance increase.

I have an old P120 I use as a web servers without any prob.

I don't think it will be very useful to get a quick cd-rom, buy it if you think you will listen a lot of music or install tons of progz, but a 6x cdrom can do the job

A 7200rpm hd can be useful, but because this old computer probably only use dma33, it will be a lot slower than any recent computer running it. However, if your actual hd is a 5400 rpm running with dma33, it will be 30% faster anyways

If your motherboard is a good ones, you will probably be able to overclock the cpu, but some Mb doesn't support this, watch out. If your box crash every 5 min, maybe your mb/cpu doesn't support overclocking.

There's not tips to make a computer faster, but if you plan running linux on it, make sure you have a very small kernel. My old box only take 15meg RAM for booting, try to do better

Thanks for your responses so far, they have been helpful. I got everything together, installed slackware with no problem. I rebooted my computer, go to the boot screen where you type in Linux, and than it starts to decompress the kernel and hangs everytime. I will start researching the dma and overclocking option as that seems the only choices to go for performance. Maybe that will help


Thanks for you responses,
Poorman

Your Slackware hanging is probably caused by Large Hard Drive issues on the *old* BIOS of your computer... There are lots of ways around, my favorite is still to create a small (20 MB will do) partion (the first partiition), and mount it as boot. Because Slackware has the brain dead habbit of putting kernels right in /, you still have to boot off the boot floppy the first time around, copy the kernel to the /boot mount, edit lilo.conf accordingly and run lilo.

Damn, I love slack

Hey! Slackware is the best distro

For the CD-ROM, yes for example I have a P133 with a 44x CD-ROM