Old pc faster than ecent

[Gabriel Dragffy]

On Thu, 2006-12-14 at 10:05 +0100, sebastien wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I've got 2 computers.
> An old one (Pentium 3, 733MHz 370Mb RAM) and a recent one (laptop
> celeron 1,5GHz 270Mb SDRAM).
> 
> The old one has ubuntu LTS : perfect ! It is fast. 0% SWAP used. 133Mb
> RAM used when no window's opened. I can do everything I need with this
> configuration, that's perfect.
> 
> The laptop has ubuntu 6,10 running : I find it slow compared to my
> old machine, while I expected it to be pretty much faster ! ! ! That's
> crazy !
> 145Mb RAM of 256 used and 5,5% SWAP used (23Mb)
> 
> I could not install LTS on this laptop because of an xserver problem,
> while the 6.10 worked out of the box. So, I cannot make a real
> comparison between the two configurations.
> 
> I wonder why ubuntu 6.10 uses Swap memory, on this laptop
> while no application is running ? And is it slow because it uses this
> swap memory ?
> 
> Sebastien.

I shouldn't be so surprised. I compare the performance of my 2 year old
desktop with a brand new sony laptop, the desktop wins. Although the
laptop technically has better specs for the achievement of
miniaturization the performance is blown away. Laptops have slow
processors and hard drives... everything really has been watered down to
make it smaller and less energy hungry. Don't forget that a Celeron is a
cripple when it comes to speed/power, it has the GHz but it doesn't have
the L2 cache and probably not the front-side-bus too. A 1.5GHz celeron
is about (in my opinion) equivalent to a 'normal' P4 running at half the
speed. Having said that, even I'm lumbered with a celery, sorry, celeron
in my lappy. Laptop performance sucks compared to similar desktops, but
laptops sure win in the mobility stakes!

>