RH9, Gateway Solo 2500 Notebook - Need Speed Tips
 

Hi. Just installed RH9 on an old Gateway Solo 2500 laptop that has 64 MB RAM, 300 MHz processor, and no surprises otherwise. This is my second linux installation, and it went off just fine.

I'm not happy with the performance of RH9 on the laptop, however. Everything is very sluggish: windows take forever to close/open, even bringing up a file in vi or emacs takes a few minutes. I'm planning on using the machine for emacs, email, and some light MATLAB/Maple work, but I'm starting to wonder if I wasn't expecting too much from RH9.

Any tips on how to get RH9 and everything else running better are greatly appreciated. Currently investigating each process listed in 'System Monitor', which is consuming too much time. As it stands, System Monitor indicates that the CPU uses an average of 45% just to keep RH9 running with XWindows and GNOME. Throw the CPU needed for the System Monitor in there, and that machine is maxed out when I want to know what's going on with the background processes.

Just want to get this to be a stable machine that doesn't take forever to boot up and run programs. Thanks.

I also have SuSE 9.0 install on a Gateway 2500, and it runs fast. Try and increasing your memeory. I had 96MB and it did run sluggish, then I bought a 128MB stick and now it flys, planning to buy another 128 soon, and I should be happy...(my 2500 can only accept 256MB in the slots)

Okay, andy, I might try that. Thanks

Only thing that strikes me as odd is that Win98, while sluggish, wasn't nearly as bad as RH9 with only 64 MB of RAM to play with.

Looks like 128 MB RAM is relatively cheap, though, so maybe I'll give it a shot.

If anybody else knows of any tweaks to RH9 itself, please share. I'm still looking for tips and coming up empty handed through google.

have you tried using blackbox or another window manager? is it still sluggish then?