Have put together a computer MB Aopen AX6LC, PII 300, 96mb Ram, ATI Radeon 8500 Graphics Card, SuSE 9.0 and it seems to run as if its in mega slow mode. Can't run any arcade type games as its so slow, any hints on how to speed it up a bit. Also how do you disable the system sounds when a dialog etc opens. Regards Stan
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On Thursday 06 May 2004 20:36, Stan Fraser wrote:
Have put together a computer MB Aopen AX6LC, PII 300, 96mb Ram, ATI Radeon 8500 Graphics Card, SuSE 9.0 and it seems to run as if its in mega slow mode. Can't run any arcade type games as its so slow, any hints on how to speed it up a bit. Also how do you disable the system sounds when a dialog etc opens.
Have you run "top" from a console, is anything eating away at CPU or Memory
You don't have an awful lot of RAM, running new versions of KDE, Mozilla, Openoffice etc with 96MB is going to result in a awful lot of swap disk use.
Leading onto that you want to see if your hard drive is using DMA Assuming that Linux is installed and running from the first (or only) drive in your system, as root type....
hdparm -d /dev/hda
should give you /dev/hda: using_dma = 1 (on)
If not then you are suffering a large performance hit by not using DMA, however usually it is turned off because something thinks that some of your hardware is not compatible with the DMA modes. Saying that the detection method is a bit on the paranoid side, so you can force it on at your own risk (it may cause data corruption on incompatible hardware or if you have used one of the old style 40 conductor IDE cables on modern hardware) by issuing a hdparm -d1 /dev/hda
But as I say, use this with caution and only if you don't care about the data on your hard drive, because it could go horribly wrong.
This will only stay set to the next boot to give you an opportunity to try the system with it on.
To make the change permanent, go to YaST from the settings menu and you'll find a tool to change the boot DMA settings under "hardware"
To change the system sounds look under control centre from the launch menu, and navigate to the system notifications section.
If it's only games that are slow, which ones ? If you are referring to 3D ones then you may not have hardware 3D enabled on your card (someone else will have to help you here as I don't have any ATI cards) and if even 2D ones are slow then it may be that you are using the VESA driver
look in /etc/X11/XF86config under Section "Device" and check the line "Driver"
On 06-May-04 Stan Fraser wrote:
Have put together a computer MB Aopen AX6LC, PII 300, 96mb Ram, ATI Radeon 8500 Graphics Card, SuSE 9.0 and it seems to run as if its in mega slow mode. Can't run any arcade type games as its so slow, any hints on how to speed it up a bit. Also how do you disable the system sounds when a dialog etc opens. Regards Stan
As with Red Hat 9, so with SuSE 9: both KDE and Gnome are now big beasts, and you are probably suffering from this fact: mucho swappo!
Your PII 300 ain't that fast either, but I think the best solution is to give your new one a treat in the shape of LOTS of RAM.
I'd take it up to 512MB at least, to give yourself elbow-room. 96 MB is way to small for fast work with those overheads.
I have a PII 366 laptop with 128MB RAM, and suffer similar problems with RH9: Switching from workspace to workspace, I often have to wait several seconds while the current windows/apps are swapped out, and several more while the new ones are swapped in. Runs snappily enough when all this is finished, though, for the sort of thing I generally do on it, but some apps (e.g. mozilla) can get waist deep in mud at times, since they're big in their own right.
Hope this is helpful! Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 167 1972 Date: 06-May-04 Time: 22:34:11 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------
On Thu, May 06, 2004 at 10:34:11PM +0100, Ted Harding wrote:
On 06-May-04 Stan Fraser wrote:
Have put together a computer MB Aopen AX6LC, PII 300, 96mb Ram, ATI Radeon 8500 Graphics Card, SuSE 9.0 and it seems to run as if its in mega slow mode. Can't run any arcade type games as its so slow, any hints on how to speed it up a bit. Also how do you disable the system sounds when a dialog etc opens. Regards Stan
As with Red Hat 9, so with SuSE 9: both KDE and Gnome are now big beasts, and you are probably suffering from this fact: mucho swappo!
Your PII 300 ain't that fast either, but I think the best solution is to give your new one a treat in the shape of LOTS of RAM.
I'd take it up to 512MB at least, to give yourself elbow-room. 96 MB is way to small for fast work with those overheads.
I have a PII 366 laptop with 128MB RAM, and suffer similar problems with RH9: Switching from workspace to workspace, I often have to wait several seconds while the current windows/apps are swapped out, and several more while the new ones are swapped in. Runs snappily enough when all this is finished, though, for the sort of thing I generally do on it, but some apps (e.g. mozilla) can get waist deep in mud at times, since they're big in their own right.
If you're running either KDE or Gnome try getting rid of them and running a leaner/meaner desktop such as xfce.
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Chris Green -
Stan Fraser -
Ted.Harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk -
Wayne Stallwood