Your hard drive is the same speed, right? That's what most of the time is spent doing when loading programs. Also, you 1/2 GB is a pretty tiny memory, and while Linux virtual memory is much more effective and efficient that windoze, it's still virtual (and depends on the hard drive) so that won't be helping much. You'll get a far more reasonable speed comparison of your CPU when it's doing something compute intensive (perhaps resizing or sharpening an image in GIMP--but watch out for the paging issue). Cheers, Simon "You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions." — Naguib Mahfouz ----- Original Message ---- From: John Pierce <john.j35@gmail.com> To: suse-linux-e@suse.com Sent: Sunday, October 22, 2006 8:16:55 AM Subject: [SLE] Athlon 64 not so fast? Hello list! I just installed opensuse 10.1 X86_64 on my new Athlon 64 base system, 160GB sata II 3GB drive and I am not seeing what I perceive as a speed demon. On my Athlon XP 1800 with 10.1 and all updates applied when (for example) I click on the terminal icon in kde it takes roughly ~3 sec. to open and have a terminal I can type in. On this new system it takes about the same amount of time, this is one of those places that I thought I would see a noticeable time difference as in I would click the icon and would have seemingly instaneous opening of the terminal. I notice the same thing with other apps which I would have thought would be extremely faster but I am not seeing the performance difference I expected. Still 4 to 5 seconds to open the gimp, 7 to 8 seconds to open openoffice writer. I have loaded all of the optimized defaults in the bios and 512Mb of pc3200 ram. Maybe I am was just deluding myself and built myself up for an extremely fast machine, one that would pale my athlon xp machines by comparison. Is there something that I should have/could have done during the installation that is affecting the performance? Did I miss something? TIA John -- Registered Linux User 263680, get counted at http://counter.li.org -- Check the headers for your unsubscription address For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the archives at http://lists.suse.com Please read the FAQs: suse-linux-e-faq@suse.com