Looking for suggestions to speed up desktop performance

[Noah Dain]

On Sun, 5 Dec 2004 14:04:46 -0800, Daniel Robitaille
<robitaille at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> > > > Things just seem sluggish when I move windows around and the
> > > > > windows are slow to redraw.
> > > > >
> > > > > My system:
> > > > >
> > > > > Radeon 7000 AGP w/ 32MB
> > > > > Sempron CPU (1.6GHz)
> > > > > Gigabyte MB ( KT600 chipset )
> > > > > PC3200 256MB of RAM
> > >
> > > Yep definitely, as Link said, add more RAM.  My system was about similar
> > > to yours, then I switched from 256MB of RAM, to 512MB, and the
> > > improvement was obvious, try it, RAM is cheap and is always a good
> > > thing.
> 
> My main home machine is a PIII with only 192mb of memory.  And I would
> say warty work pretty well.  You cannot do heavy-duty movie playing or
> gaming on it,  for examples, and you cannot run an insane number of
> applets or fancy desktop eye candies,  but for normal day-to-day
> operation (xterm,  rhymthbox, Firefox, thunderbird, etc) in a home
> environment  it works pretty well and is a very affordable system.  I
> would say say that's it feels more responsive than the previous distro
> that was on this hardware (Fedora 1 using either Gnome or KDE)
> 
> And I'm sure for some people (and in some part of the world) RAM is
> not so cheap to get (and in some older PCs, technically impossible to
> install)
> 
> 
> 
> --

I have been experiencing something very similar on a laptop with an
ati 7500.  Resizing windows is abysmal and uses up all available cpu
time to boot.  This is the case with gtk and plain qt apps like qps
and even different window managers.  The only programs i've tried that
seem to resize as expected would be xclock and xcalc, but that may be
due to their sheer simplicity.

I would have to suspect the xfree/xorg ati drivers of having
lackluster 2d acceleration.

--
Noah Dain