On Wed, 2006-02-15 at 06:40, Mike McCarty wrote: > > > > Might just be the best an older drive can do. I'd guess that > > Eh? This system is just over one year old. Is that what you > mean by "older drive"? Maybe it's an 'older design'. Since drive prices have dropped so much I've generally gotten the 7200 RPM versions with at least 8M cache on board and think of the speed boost as a 'new vs. old' difference when it really isn't. > OTOH, with memory unloaded, it took 24 secs to load. After > exiting, it then took 8 sec to load. So it is the disc. But, unless you boot frequently, adding enough ram to cache most of the stuff you use (or weeding out what you don't need, but Gnome is a big part of the problem) so you page active memory out will take care of the problem. Your X usage seemed unusual too but I'm not much of an expert in that department. Is this an on-board chip that steals system RAM? X can also consume a lot of CPU if the video chip doesn't do at least the 2D acceleration operations itself (block moves, etc.). --- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx