Live CD SLOooooowww

[David Teague]

I recently received Ubuntu Live and Install CDs. 

I ran the live CD on my older 500 MHz 512 MB 
RAM machine. I have never seen a system as slow. 
It took a full 2 minutes to load OpenOffice.org writer, 
1:30 to load Firefox. 

Once loaded, keyboard response is adequate but the 
load times are intolerable.

Knopppix, which uses KDE, runs a bit faster on this 
machine, but it isn't fast enough to be satisfactory. 

Libranet is not quite as slow, but it is also too slow to be
usable on this system. I plan to install Ubuntu to see how 
much of the slow loading is loading from the CD.

I really thought that Linux is supposed to make "old" 
hardware usable. I hope this isn't what they had in 
mind.

I have not tried XP on this machine, but I will.

XP runs fine on a 750 MHz 700MB machine. Woody 
with Gnome 1.4 runs fine on a 350 MHz 400MB machine. 

Does anyone have questions to complete a picture of 
the system that you might need, or suggestions to explain 
this. 

I hope for suggestions on how to speed things up short
of a purchase of another machine.

David Teague,  http://cs.wcu.edu/~dbt 
Advocating Free Software and Double Bass tuned in fifths
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