how can i speed it up

[pengwin]

after years of windows bsod's and crashes i finally formatted and installed mandrake 8.0 from an iso i burned off the mandrake site.
it installed just fine but starts up soooooo slow and runs kinda slow....how can i speed things up ?
the computer is a dell 166 mhz pentium with an ibm deskstar 3.2 gb hard drive (5400 rpm), 64 megs of ram, ati 98 expert 8 meg video card.
also, i am using the netscape 4.7 browser that came with the mandrake hooked through a befsr41 router to an external alcatel speed touch at home modem (ethernet). i connected with bellsouth o.k. but am having a difficult time reading the print on the browser (fuzzy and small print size).

pen
:confused:

[bdg1983]

A popular question here at Linuxnewbie.

Turn off any services you do not need. web servers, mail servers etc.

With Mandrake, you can probably do that in the KDE Control Center under System/Services.

I've heard that Mandrake 8 comes with hdparm already setup. Run 'hdparm -Tt /dev/hda' where hda is your Linux drive. If the results are similiar to mine (buffered are not somewhere around 3.7 MB/sec, then hdparm has been setup. You can play around with hdparm, but be careful as you can damage your drive or have to reinstall.

These are my results and I haven't tweaked the settings yet.

/dev/hda:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 128 MB in 0.82 seconds =156.10 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 4.92 seconds = 13.01 MB/sec

[bdg1983]

Oh, and getting a faster cpu and more memory will certainly help as Mandrake 8 is apparently quite bloated are the minimum requirements are fairly high.

Guess you'll be running out this afternoon and getting a AMD 1.4 or P4 1.7 with around a Gig of memory. ;) Remember the stores usually close at 6 on Saturdays.

I'll pay for the shipping if you pickup two of them. :D

Some of the experienced Mandrake users here may have other suggestions to help.

[TacKat]

Number one solution is to change window managers to something more trim. Blackbox or WindowMaker are good alternatives that run smoothly. My system performed sluggishly in KDE, but it runs smooth as silk in windowmaker.

[pengwin]

my new dell is a 933mhz but i am not ready to put linux on it yet.....not till i know a little more about linux.
i did install redhat 5.2 once with partition magic and a dual boot setup on the 166 and it had very nice graphics and performed smoothly; just wasn't able to get on the web at that time.

i'll try your suggestion with the ibm hd; i have a maxtor 8.something gb drive i can install - it runs at 7200 rpm.
or may even try to find the 6.2 redhat iso and see if it goes any better.

thanks,
pen :cool:

[pengwin]

i wondered about that kde.
think i will try the windowmaker.

p :p

[frank754]

Also, regarding the fonts, I noticed that
Mandrake has a configuration program that
will allow you to import your true type
fonts from your windows partition. This
works well for Netscape, but not on some
other browsers. You will have to edit
your Netscape prefs to get a larger nice-
looking font then, if thats what you need.
Also see the NHF on true-type fonts.