[PLUG] Troubleshooting Slow Laptop -- Update

[Rich Shepard]

On Sun, 1 Feb 2009, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

> Hmmm ... only 256 MB??

   I ran Xfce on my Toshiba Portege with a full load of 96M RAM. :-) Of
course, that was an earlier version of Xfce before all the eye candy and
superfluous (IMO) junk.

> 1. There are lighter desktops than even XFCE4 if you are willing to
> forgo some eye candy. I've had very good luck with WindowMaker. It's a
> bit tricky to get set up, but once you do, you can customize it to
> just about any work flow. One of these days I'm going to try LXDE,
> which has a pretty good reputation for lightness.

   Good advice. I'll look at WM, fluxbox, or the others.

> 2. I did some memory size testing on browsers the other day. Firefox
> is the largest in real and virtual memory. Seamonkey had the smallest
> RSS and Opera had the smallest VSZ. My recommendation is to go with
> Seamonkey because it has both a browser and an email client that's
> pretty close to Thunderbird, and it's open source. Incidentally, the
> Debian "unbranded" version of Seamonkey is called "iceape". The
> unbranded version may be lighter weight than the official branded
> Mozilla version, but I haven't tested that.

   OK. If they look and feel close enough to Firefox and Thunderchicken she
may adjust to them. Since seamonkey/iceape/whatever is also a Mozilla
product I'm surprised it takes fewer resouces than the individual apps.

> 3. I haven't done much with either AbiWord or Gnumeric since
> OpenOffice 3 came out. I don't know about the Ubuntu builds, but the
> openSUSE builds of OO 3 seem to have finally wrung out a lot of the
> performance issues. I haven't taken back *all* the nasty things I said
> about OO, but at least they've cleaned up their act a bit.

   She needs nothing other than a writing tool. That's why I moved her from
OO.o to AbiWord.

> 4. When you're looking for memory hogs, "pmap -d" is your friend.

   Thank you.

> 5. IIRC "evince" uses less RAM than Acrobat Reader for reading PDFs.

   So does xpdf.

Rich

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