On Sun, 2004-02-01 at 05:14, Michael Ben-Gershon wrote: > I then gradually moved over my old stuff. I found that > my quite acceptable P4-1500 with 512M and an old Radeon graphics card was > just not up to the new desktop environment (which I find very pleasant to > use) so I had to do a major hardwarre upgrade as well. Michael, perhaps you only needed to upgrade your video card -- NOT your whole system!!! My wife's system is a Pentium III x 1 Ghz. Although I recently upgraded her memory from 256 MB to 640 MB, 256 MB was fine for what she did with it. I just wanted her to be able to open OpenOffice on her machine and keep it open without inducing swapping when she performed other tasks. Everything seemed to speed up quite a bit after I increased her memory. At one point, after doing a clean install of her system to RedHat 9, the video was so damn slow. After a while, I realized that previously, I had been running her system in 16-bit graphics mode and I used 32-bit graphics mode during the install of RH 9. Two years had past since I had updated her system, which used to be my system, so I had forgotten that the ATI All-In-Wonder Pro 3D (PCI) card with 8 MB of RAM just couldn't run in 32-bit graphics mode very well. I reduced the color depth to 16 bits and the video performance became very good again. In 32-bits, video was a dog. It didn't matter that my processor was very fast. At some point, I want to replace the old All-In-Wonder with an NVidia and a Hauppauge Tv card and install MythTv, which looks very very slick. For now, my wife is happy with her setup so I'm in no rush to rock the boat. -- Bruce W. Bigby, http://home.rochester.rr.com/bigbyofrocny Don't be fooled by sale pitches. The only money that you save is money that you keep. Anything less is a deception. PGP key at http://pgp.mit.edu
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