My Compaq Armada110 laptop crawls
 

Hi,

I am absolutely new to Linux, I wanted to try something new from Windows and installed Mandrake 10 on my old Compaq Armada 110, and I am trying to have fun .

The installation went fine, but the problem is that the system crawls, it is so slow that i want to throw it out through the window, the Internet takes nearly 45 sec to load, the programs take a long time to load to.
I must have done something wrong at the installation point.

The system has following: 65Mb ram, 600Mhz cpu, Cyberblade i7 video, 13Gb harddisk

Do you have some help in this matter.

Thank you,
Totte

hi totte, welcome to lq. some things to try/look at to speed up a bit. your probably running kde or gnome, try switching to something lighter, try all of the other window managers, one or more of them should speed things up. another thing to look at is the services that start at boot. mandrake has a gui tool in the mandrake control center to start and stop available services. those things should speed you up a bit, but, i wouldn't look for any drastic changes w/only 65 mb ram. hope something here helps.
good luck.

tjenare totte!

Well, you've to do a lot of things to speed up. Your computer is quite fast for Linux, but the memories are relatively low. Here are some tips to speed tips up:

1 - A faster distribution would make wonders as Slackware or an easier to use, but still great, Libranet, which is Debian based. There's nothing wrong with Mandrake either, as long as you disable all useless process running on the background ;). This can easily be disabled on Mandrake Control Center.

2 - A faster desktop or window manager would be neat. KDE and Gnome does a nice job with their "user-friendly" goal, but they are getting heavier and heavier. WinXP is way faster then those two ones for crying out loud :D. I'd say, go with XFCE or Fluxbox

3 - Use lighter Browsers, as Mozilla Firefox instead of Mozilla or Netscape. It's extremely fast and nice. In fact, you'd use that one all the time, regardless the Operating System you are running.

4 - If you need an e-mail client, skip Evolution. It's too heavy too. A good alternative is Mozilla Thunderbird. It's just as neat as Outlook Express but without all those security holes and spreading of viruses :p.

5 - Office: If you need Office, you've to use Open Office or it's non free brother Star Office. Unfortunatelly, OpenOffice takes a lot of time to open even in a 2GHZ processor :(. Now, if all you need is a Word Processor I'd say go with Abiword and if you need a spreadsheet, I'd say go with GNumeric. They both are really great and really fast.

Following the steps above, I could get my compaq armada with a 166 MHZ processor and 32 of RAM to run really neat, so just think how nice this is going to run on your machine ;).

A final note though, Abiword, Fluxbox, Gnumeric, XFCE and many others are shipped with most of the distributions around, so try installing from your Mandrake CD's first ;)

Regards!

Thank you for your advices.
I vill try out all of those and try to look a litle bit braver.

Sincerelly yours,
Totte

I want to thank both of you, Peacedog and Megaman X, for the advices.

I am trying to figure out how to install those files I have been busy downloading from all over the Internet.

I will tell you if it helpt, othervice I am going to reinstall everithing with minimum of programs.
I have a hard time trying to learn to use the commands in the terminal, and it goes slovly, but I am not giving up yet.

Thank you again.

Sincerelly,
Totte

you might consider looking to your install cd's before doing all that downloading, mandrake 10 probably has as up to date software packages as you'll find. just try to be very selective w/the packages you install.
good luck.

Hi PEACEDOG,
Yes, i know now. Mandrake is going just fine now after all tweaking with your help.

Next stepp, install Mandrake on a computer with WinXp Pro, we will see how that goes.

Thanks again,
Totte