Yahoo messenger is not always on. Also not all the programs run at once. I don't think its due to a particular application. I tried running firefox, GNUCash, Terminal, Yahoo Messenger, gqview etc individually different combintaion. The effect is almost same. Openoffice, I guess will take more time on windows either. so not considered. Only conclusion is more the applications (>2-3) worst the performance. Will upgrade to FC3 make any difference? -Kshitij > Message: 10 > Date: Fri, 10 Dec 2004 23:12:21 +0000 > From: James Wilkinson <james@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> > Subject: Re: FC2 GUI on Intel Celeron 500MHz very slow > To: fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx > Message-ID: <20041210231221.GB16441@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii > > Kshitij Velhal wrote: > > Thanks James for you time and effort... > > No problem. > > > The typical application mix that I run includes Firefox browser (2-3 > > windows no tabs), yahoo messenger, evolution, GNUCash, 1-2 Terminals, > > occasionally openoffice programs and gqview > > All at once? Could you try one or two of them at a time, and try and > narrow it down? Or try running *without* one or two of them, and see if > things get any better? > > I don't have any experience with yahoo messenger and don't know what it > does. I strongly suspect that it's closed source and programmed to be > flashy rather than efficient (although one could say that about certain > open source apps, too). > > Note that openoffice inherently does quite a lot of disk reading. It > might be worth getting the Windows version of it, and comparing how it > performs under Windows 2000. > > > The hard disk is quiet old say @3-4 years. Motherboard doesn't support > > latest and graetest hard disks. So will have to bear with it. Is Hard > > disk the culprit? > > Um. > > I don't think a three to four year old disk should particularly be a > problem. I suspect your motherboard *does* support some of the latest > hard disks: mine does, and it's a five year old BX based motherboard. > But I doubt your disk subsystem is going to be much slower for your > purposes than the equivalent on the latest Pentium 4. > > You could try > hdparm -tT /dev/hda > to see what sort of throughput you get, but with that range of apps, I > suspect you're going to be having lots of relatively short reads rather > than a few long ones. In that situation, a hard disk spends more of its > time getting the head to the right part of the disk than it does > transferring the data to the computer. > > Three more commands that are worth trying, to make sure that the hard > disk is OK: > # smartctl -l error /dev/hda > which will check if the disk has recorded any errors > # smartctl -t short /dev/hda > which will do a low-level check on the disk: wait a minute for that to > run, then do > # smartctl -l selftest /dev/hda > to see the results. > > James. >
