Re: suse 9.1 -unofficial distribution?
From: Arthur Hagen (art_at_broomstick.com)
Date: 06/20/04
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Date: Sat, 19 Jun 2004 23:50:53 -0400
Hendrik van Hees <hees@comp.tamu.edu> wrote:
> Now my question: When I use my Windows XP Home edition, which I dared
> to update with the socalled "MS software upgrades". Up to now,
> despite my anxiety, no signs of virusses are seen. Nevertheless, I
> wonder how slow Windows feels compared to Linux (SuSE 9.1, as
> explained above, also the
> 9.0 which I had for a week or so). It cannot be the hardware, because
> with 2.8 GHz all should feel rather quick, as is the case under Linux.
> Is there a trick to make Windows XP as fast as Linux (another socalled
> "Service Pack", which I'd honestly name bug fix)? Am I doing something
> wrong with it? I just left the Windows as it was from the beginning
> and only added an office package from my institute (with Word and
> PowerPoint, which are the reasons why I must switch to Windows from
> time to time) and installed some free software to be compatible with
> the real computer world (Linux machines in my institute) like scp and
> acroread. Do you have any idea, what might be wrong, or is Windows
> really as bad as I always thought?
I'm no expert, but I'll be glad to help if I can.
Yes, Windows XP is quite bad. But it can be helped a lot, by turning off
all the unnecessary stuff that either is of very little (or probably no) use
to you, or is just eye candy. In addition, NTFS is a rather slow file
system (slower than FAT32, but with added security features and
journaling -- think of it as EXT3 for Windows), and truly NEEDS a
defragmentation every so often.
Some hints to speeding up Windows XP:
- Right-click the desktop, and choose properties. Turn off some of the
effects. (That's just like with KDE, which can get rather sluggish because
of visual masturbation being enabled by default.)
- Right-click the Start menu, and do likewise there. You don't really
*need* logos and stuff on the start menu (just like KDE, again).
- Open "Administrative Tools" from the Control Panel (or from the Start
menu, if you have enabled it there). Open "Services". Look and weep.
That's resident programs that start with Windows. No, you don't need all of
them, and many of them can be stopped and disabled (prevents future
automatic startup). There's some good sites on the net that explains which
services that most people can do without -- Google for them :)
- Choose "Run" from the Start menu. Enter "msconfig". It too will allow
you to disable services, but also other programs that start automatically
with Windows, or when you log in.
- Right-click "My Computer" and choose Properties. Alternatively, choose
System settings from the control panel. Go to the Hardware tab, and then
Device Manager. Choose "Show Hidden Devices" from the View menu. Any
devices you have installed drivers for, but don't have the hardware for at
present will show up as greyed out. Any devices with problems will show up
with a red mark through them. Delete any of them if you can (I'm not sure
that XP Home lets you do this, though). Disable others that you don't use
(like a built-in winmodem, if you always use ethernet).
- Turn off the automatic restore feature, and do backups instead. It can
restore the registry and *some* files if you screw up, but at the price of
excessive disk use and slowness when it saves all the restore information.
And as often as not, the problem is with one of the files that are not
restored (or deleted) by the restore point. It is a nice feature, but the
price is just too steep.
Now for some disk cleanup.
- Open an Explorer window -- any folder/file window will do. Enter %TEMP%
in the location field (if you don't see a location field to enter anything
in, choose the View menu, Toolbars, and "Address bar"). Anything in there
older than the last reboot should be deleted.
- Likewise with files in C:\WINNT\Temp (or C:\WINDOWS\Temp, depending on the
exact OS version/type).
- Has Windows ever crashed? If so, the default location for crash dumps
(like core files) is in
C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\DrWatson\
Zonk user.dmp, and take a look at drwtsn32.log to see what happened.
- Empty the trashcan
- Defragment the drive(s)
Oh, and if you're behind a firewall and don't read email on the XP box,
uninstall any virus killers you may have, or at least configure them to not
scan each and every file on every access (which is usually the default).
That puts a HUGE load on the system -- much like using clamav+clamuko does
under Linux.
You mentioned AcroRead. It has a tendency to stay resident in the
background after you've used it, and even sometimes eat CPU while doing so.
Make sure that it's not running (CTRL-ALT-Delete or right-click the clock
and bring up the Task Manager, check the Processes tab, and kill the
acrord32 task if found, and you're not currently reading an acrobat
document).
Lastly, you might want to consider getting Windows 2000 instead of XP. The
difference between Windows 2000 and Windows XP is less than the difference
between SuSE 8.2 with default KDE and SuSE 9.0 with all KDE features turned
on. In other words, not all that much, and the kernel versions are so
similar that you won't have problems running something from one of them on
the other. Apart from the automatic restore point feature (which I don't
like because of how much it slows down things), there's precious little in
favour of XP over 2000 -- W2k is leaner and faster. Just like SuSE 8.2 is
leaner and faster than 9.0 :-)
Regards,
-- *Art
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