The fastest performance in Linux for the least money

One word-

Memory

If you have an older box (P3 or P4), it may have slugged along with 128 MB or 256 MB of RAM. You wondered why it took 2 mins to open Excel, but you never knew the difference. You thought it was a feature, not a bug! Now you have used a faster machine, you realize you wasted almost an entire year waiting for programs to load....

You heard about Linux and it looked interesting. Where to start? Update to at least 512 MB memory and if you have shared video memory, allocate up to the max. Sure, you can get a Linux distribution to run on 64 K of RAM and you can multi task, but not with a GUI. You can get older PC133 256 or 512 sticks for next to nothing, and if you watch old yard sales, you can sometimes get them for FREE.

I took a computer not even booted for 5 yrs and installed Ubuntu on it. It wiped securely the old drive, and I got a 13 Gig drive now with Linux on it. Trying for many hours to install Linux on another machine frustrated my son-in-law. I handed him the 13 Gig and he set it as a slave. The box used the 13 GIG as a swap file and zip, the install went like it should have. :major

 

dude, i have a system running netbsd with 32mb of ram and a p133. runs absolutely perfect. when it comes to linux or bsd, you do NOT need to add more ram. unless youre using something ***** like ubuntu, redhat/fedora/mandriva/suse.
for dinosaurs of systems, dont upgrade a thing. use either slackware linux or netbsd.

 

plodr dont worry about it.

 

Plodr is right. Better to make a new thread than to dredge up a dead one.

Please do not do it. Thank you.