[wplug] wplug Digest, Vol 128, Issue 7

[Stephen R Phillips]

For the person with the sluggish laptop:
:D
consider enlightenment for your window manager (it might take a bit of work)

http://www.enlightenment.org/


Gnome is now like that K stuff was (always hated it) it's also a potential security issues with using Javascript as part of the WM functionality. I am not sure of the politics of what happened to Gnome but it seems a lot of people 'think' of a computer like a web site or PDF form (only). I've seen people using Javascript to mess with their clock speed on the processor and the SMB bus to watch the temperature.  Anyhow enlightenment can be adjusted for the features (etc) and is intended from the start to be for low resource systems.


The next thing is what is being loaded for the kernal? On many new wireless things the network is done SDR (software defined radio) with the main processor doing almost all the work. For power wasting and performance, this is killer. Keep that in mind. SDR has it's place, it's not for "high speed" networking, unless you want a slow machine.

You also need to investigate the drivers for the display, you may be running purely in software mode.


Are you running 32 or 64 bit application software? That's the next potential problem. If you have 1G uou don't need too (run 64bit software run 32bit. You will otherwise suffer horribly from the size of application space etc. 64bit does not necessarily mean faster if it consumes large amounts of RAM just to operate. In 64bit mode a simple "function" allocates 8 bytes for 1 8bit char (yes). In 32 bit mode it's 1/2 that. All of this adds up quickly. So 4G is actaully more like 2G in 64bit mode (yes it's sad) at least application wise. It's not "that" bad but it's not too far off either (it was like 1.86 times more application space or something). A quick way too look at it is in 64bit mode you have 2x the instruction size (you sort of do) with 64bit alignment (most times) mandated. With 32bit the same applies. 


I ran a duron 800mhz (1280x1024 main display) with 768M of RAM for a while, it was fast enough in 32bit mode to watch video (HD) ray trace and download data off the internet 10 years ago. I used GNOME 1+ for the window manager. It was more than fast enough.  


Stephen R. Phillips was here 



Please be advised what was said may be absolutely wrong, and hereby this disclaimer follows.  I reserve the right to be wrong and admit I was wrong in front of the entire world. It won't be the first or the last in all likelyness. 



> 
> I am trying to resurrect one of the old laptops I have for my kids to play
> pbskids games.
> 
> The laptop definitely isn't new but it is respectable.
> 
> Dell Inpsiron e1405
> Core 2 Duo T5600 @ 1.83GHz
> 1GB of RAM (can go to 4 but I'd rather not spend money on a ancient laptop)
> 
> 
> Besides the usual wireless snafu, the thing is just dog slow. It crawls
> when doing more than a single application. The graphics are slow. I could
> put on a different display manager.
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
>