Spanspek

Much of the time, I use an old IBM Thinkpad T30. I'm running Suse Linux 10.3 with KDE. I went with Suse because I got the full version of 10.0 for a song. Since then, I've upgraded with Opensuse. The only downside is that I can't get the modem working! That's not much of an issue because at home the ADSL works fine.

I also originally formatted the Linux partitions with reiserfs. If only I'd known that development of it was about to die. As it turned out, one of the contributing factors was that the author was charged with his wife's murder. I should have gone with ext2. Perhaps I'll re-install at some point.

Anyway, the whole thing runs pretty slowly with only 512MB of RAM and the KDE monster. I should go to at least 1GB. (How much RAM can it address, and what's the largest DDR2100 chip available?) I'm sure that would help a lot. The hard drive grinds away an enormous amount of time as, I presume, it writes to and reads from various caches and the swap partition. The delay can be a a significant proportion of a minute.

But, until I get off my backside and buy some more RAM, I thought I'd try switching to a different desktop. So I'm currently on Xfce. Login and logout times aren't different and the HD is still hit quite hard. It feels a little faster overall but there are still times when the hard drive grinds for a long time.