[ILUG] Best Distro for P2 Thinkpad 390E ?

[Niall O Broin]

On 15 May 2006, at 20:46, PJ Wall wrote:

> The disk is 6gb, and I have 128mb ram (and I also have a spare  
> 256mb chip which I might squuze in if this would make a difference?

Tripling the memory from 128MB to 384MB (or even less, if you have to  
remove say 64MB to fit the 256MB in) will make all the difference in  
the world, because laptop disks are SLOW as swap. In general terms on  
a Linux box which is low in RAM, adding more will make a much bigger  
difference in performance than increasing processor speed. (And Linux  
is not the worst here - OS-X wants RAM like an addict wants heroin. I  
recently had to use an OS-X box with ONLY 512MB of RAM for a couple  
of days, and it was a painful experience even switching between two  
applications)

I wish you every success with the RAM upgrade though - IME Thinkpads  
are VERY fussy about the memory they will accept, so unless the spare  
you have was supplied specifically for that vintage of Thinkpad, you  
may have problems. Mind you, they're very polite about it. At boot  
time, if you've installed incompatible memory, you get a message  
informing you that "you have incompatible memory installed, in order  
to continue please take it out and don't let it darken my door again"  
or words to that general effect.


Niall