I mentioned in an earlier post my move from a P!! igig PC to a new dell laptop with a P4 1.6 gig and how with rh7.3 it seemed slower than the old system. I have now investigated this a little further.
I installed rh7.2 becuase I suspected KDE3 was slowing things down but although the slimmer KDE2 is a little faster it is still nowhere near as responsive as the old system. So I have played around a bit with hdparm to see if hard drive performance is a factor. hdparm reports a cache speed of over 200MBytes/sec (basically the memeory bus speed) but the cached disk read speed is a mere 3MBytes/sec. dma is not enebaled by default but if i use hdparm to enable it, cached disk read speed jumps to over 20Mbytes/sec. Set like this, applications load about twice as fast.
Then I tried all the PIO modes but this mad eno difference. So I started to set dma modes, starting from 0, but this froze the system and forced me to hard reset. So my questions are:
1. How well should a basic install be able to automagically select good disk drive parameters
2. Where are these stored and actioned?
3. How do I find the best settings for my drive other then very tedious trial and arror?
Thanks
ian