Advice needed to speed up very slow machine

From: Don Jackson (don1103_at_azark.com)
Date: 09/26/04

  • Next message: Paul E Condon: "Re: Newbie first-time install advice: Highpoint Rocket 133SB" 
    Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2004 21:45:10 -0500
To: debian-user@lists.debian.org

    I am seeking the advice of some of you who may have been down this path
    before. Situation: I am working on an older 166 MHz Pentium-S machine with
    96 MB RAM, two 2.5GB hard drives, for a neighbor (rather poor) here in the
    Arkansas Ozarks. She will be using it mainly for Email, web surfing, and
    possibly a few games. She is somewhat used to Win98 and Outlook Express, but
    since I keep getting phone calls from her every time W hiccups, I decided to
    rebuild this older computer for her and put Debian GNU/Linux Sarge on it,
    figuring it might be less work for me in "service calls" ;-)

    I have installed sarge with kernel 2.4.26 on it -- no problem. Actually,
    everything works fine on it, with KDE and Kmail and Mozilla-Firefox as my
    choices (since that's what I'm using myself). The problem is that with only
    a 166 MHz processor speed and the limited 96MB of RAM, the machine is
    agonizingly sloooooow! (I'm spoiled by my own new 2.8GHz P4 with 1GB RAM)
    For example, it takes about 4-1/2 minutes for cold boot up to the KDE
    desktop. I almost fall asleep every time I wait for Kmail to come up, and
    the same for the address book. Once Kmail is up and running, it's response
    is satisfactory.

    I feel she needs to have a GUI interface for her email, etc. since that is
    what she is used to. She is not very computer literate and I need to make it
    as easy as possible for her to operate (she's had some brain damage from an
    accident some years ago).

    Anyone have any suggestions of what I could do to improve speed within the
    constraints I have mentioned? (Yes, I know that command line email program
    would do wonders, but she needs the GUI.) I don't really need all the fancy
    stuff that the KDE desktop provides. I might mention that Win98se with
    Outlook Express is quite fast (relative to sarge/kde/kmail) on this same
    machine.

    Thanks for any suggestion you might make...

    Don 

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