Increase memory in trusted Thinkpad?

debitcardmayhem

fwor wrote: »

That's not a bad suggestion if you want fast bootup time on older hardware.

It takes a lot less time to shutdown too. I wanted to play the lottery last week with 3 minutes to go, Ubu came up in less time than Windoze does, paid my money on the Lotto and quit within 1 minute of close time. Sadly I lost but hey you can't win them all.

Donnie

debitcardmayhem wrote: »

It takes a lot less time to shutdown too. I wanted to play the lottery last week with 3 minutes to go, Ubu came up in less time than Windoze does, paid my money on the Lotto and quit within 1 minute of close time. Sadly I lost but hey you can't win them all.

So Windows would have saved you money.

GunJack

ThinkPad - GOOD, XP - GOOD, stick more RAM in it and you're fine. Don't worry 'bout Linux, nice for some, impractical for most

Hammyman

debitcardmayhem wrote: »

Someone will come along and suggest Linux (UUUUbuntu) so I was first

Not with 256MB you won't. It barely meets the minimum requirements for a GUI. Linux distros have now got a minimum requirement for a GUI that is double that of XP and 64 times that of Win98.

gaming_guy

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tronator

gaming_guy wrote: »

+1

256mb is just not enough to run a heavy desktop environment such as gnome (ubuntu default) or kde. as an example, debian lenny with xfce uses around 95% of 256mb ram after startup without any programs running on an old laptop i have.

Try Xubuntu.

Minimum system requirements

You need 192 MB RAM to run the Live CD or 192 MB RAM to install. The Alternate Install CD only requires you to have 64 MB RAM at install time.
To install Xubuntu, you need 2.0 GB of free space on your hard disk.
Once installed, Xubuntu can run with starting from 192 (or even just 128) MB RAM, but it is strongly recommended to have at least 256 MB RAM.

How did you find out that the laptop uses 95% of the memory, with the "free" command? Linux works differently than Windows. Memory is there to be used, if not by programs then for caching. When a program needs more memory it will bee freed from the memory used for caching. You paid for the RAM, why not using it

gaming_guy

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Hammyman

tronator wrote: »

Linux works differently than Windows. Memory is there to be used, if not by programs then for caching. When a program needs more memory it will bee freed from the memory used for caching. You paid for the RAM, why not using it

Linux doesn't work differently to Windows in this respect and has in fact been playing catchup. Windows has been doing this since 2006 with "Superfetch" service which is why many thought Windows Vista/Win7 was a memory hog. In fact Ubuntu requires you to install the package "preload" to do the same.

tronator

Hammyman wrote: »

Linux doesn't work differently to Windows in this respect and has in fact been playing catchup. Windows has been doing this since 2006 with "Superfetch" service which is why many thought Windows Vista/Win7 was a memory hog. In fact Ubuntu requires you to install the package "preload" to do the same.

You can defend your Windows as much as you want , but I'm not talking about readahead, I'm talking about keeping already read data in cache as it is very likely that it will be read again. Linux will use as much "free" RAM for this as it can get. This might confuse a lot of people who switch from Windows. If a program needs more memory, then the longest unused data will be dropped. I don't need to install anything. Linux does this since the beginning.

http://www.faqs.org/docs/linux_admin/buffer-cache.html