On Sunday 25 February 2007 23:56, David Brodbeck wrote:
Jonathan Wilson wrote:
What runs KDE the fastest when you have all the standard office applications running (FireFox, OpenOffice, Kontact) and SpamAssassin starts sucking the life out of your box when Kontact checks for new mail?
In that scenario, I think you'll find that how responsive your system is has more to do with how much RAM you have than how fast your CPU is. Those applications are all memory hogs, and swapping to disk will bog your system right down. I consider 512M a minimum, these days. Anything above 1G is probably past the point of diminishing returns for the kind of usage you're talking about, unless you're editing large image files in GIMP.
Besides swapping there is also graphic subsystem that needs improvement. With many applications running, system with 512 MB is quite responsive with external graphic card, and not so with internal. There are 2 reasons: 1) When adapter chip is accessing the RAM than CPU has to wait, 2) Many windows need space in graphic memory and if there is no enough application window will be redrawn each time you get focus on it, and that will appear as slow response. Recently I upgraded graphic adapter to one with 256 MB of RAM and with my habit to have quite few opened applications, ie. windows, including the GIMP, new card made system much snappier. What it does not is to make CPU run faster :-) That is the case when GIMP has a lot to calculate. -- Regards, Rajko. http://en.opensuse.org/Portal -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org