Reply #8: I have a radeon card I believe it is

[madokie]

and all the distros I've tried doesn't seem to have a problem with it. I think one aspect that may be making a difference is I am running a barebones xp that I've spent a lot of time on tweaking and getting it pretty right, or at least for me and that may be what is at play here. I'm only loading antivirus at startup and have turned off many of the services that so far I haven't needed and only the addon I've actually needed and not the ones I haven't needed yet. There can be some performance gains to be had there. Believe it or not sun java was a big waster of time. I disabled it a few weeks back and then on this iteration of xp I have loaded now I didn't install java at all and so far I haven't been told I need it by anything I do. But back when I was playing with it I would disabled it and go about my merry way and then enable it and I could definitely tell a difference. Another I found to be a slowpoke generator for my machine was IE7 pro extension. I never suspected it to be any reason to slow anything down so I never thought about it but this last time I waited a while, actually I forgot, before I installed it and as soon as I did I noticed that ie was slower in opening pages so I now don't have it loaded on my machine at all. You have to understand this is a highly hacked, actually manerized is my word for it, version of xp I have now and I think that is why it works so well. Right now I'm in the process of evaluating prefetcher and so far the jury is still out but it may be getting tossed too as since I've re enabled it this morning I haven't seen any performance increases yet. What I wish I had was a good free program to benchmark my system with. back in the dos days I had one but its been too long ago for me to remember what is was but I found back then that I could make a ramdisk in the extra 384 meg of ram I had at the time and copy autocad 10 to it via my batch file and it sure made autocad faster, maybe thats where I got the bug for playing around with the os, I don't know. Let me just say this, it is not unusual for me to purchase a product and bring it home and immediately take it apart and change something about it so as to make it work better for me. Many of my family and friends back through the years have had me manerize products for them too. Anyways when I take on the big task of getting serious about learning linux I will be asking you many questions as you indicated to me once that you would be willing to hold my hand somewhat. Yep, damn near 60 years old and still taking things apart and changing them for the better for me is me.

Dell dimension 4700 with 3 gig processor with hyperthreading turned on, a 128 meg video card, soundblaster live, 160 gig hd with 2 gig of system ram
'bout forgot I have pagefile turned off too with no problems so far. Even with 2 gig of ram the hd light would still be coming on like it was being used for pagefile duty where now it doesn't seem to do that at all.

Back in the early days with my first 20 meg harddrive it would sound like a thrashing machine so I figured that anything that made that much noise must be wearing out and sure enough I went through two of them so thats where I'm coming from in turning off pagefile. I figure this hd has only just so many read write cycles in its lifetime that if I cut down on the times its reading writing and seeking the longer it has to last. oh well, I guess its time for me to go back to my going crazy, ;-)

Hoping you are having a great day