Baslinux mailing list

[James Miller <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>]

On Wed, 4 Jun 2003 keesan2 AT cyberspace.org wrote:

> partner found at the curb a Pentium 475MHz 225MB RAM 8G hard drive with
> Redhat 7 on it that he wants to play with first.  It has Mozilla 1.01 and
> GIMP.  It also has GNOME, which slows it down to a fast crawl compared to
> BL2 on a 486 with 16M RAM.  Or maybe GNOME wants a faster video chip.  The

Where do you live?  I think I'll be moving to your neighborhood soon :)

> 8M RAM video card in the machine was bad (which is why they threw out the
> computer) and the 2M RAM onboard video (VESA 2.0) cannot keep up with
> drawing all those icons.  It was close to 10 minutes from turning on the
> computer to loading OpenOffice wordprocessor (or seemed like it anyway -
> maybe 5 minutes).  Like the Redhat 6 that I had on one computer, this
> Redhat loads every imaginable TSR before you can use it.  It seems like no
> matter how fast you make a computer, someone can make software that
> renders it unusably slow.
>
I suppose you and your partner know that video RAM for onboard chips is
often  configurable in the BIOS settings?  You may be able to increase it
to 4, 6 or 8 MB there (it uses some segment of your SDRAM).  If it is,
that may resolve, or at least help, your display problems.

James