[NBLUG/talk] Hayden to: Andrew, Troy, Bob and Augie

[troy]

On Wed, Jul 21, 2004 at 05:35:42PM -0700, hayden wrote:
> Wow!!  What an incredibly nice bunch of people!

Yes, the nblug are a super group of people!

> Troy, Would 384mb or indeed 630mb overcome this concern?  

Oh yeah.  384 would be fine.  I thought you only had 128MB.  You could
even get away with only 192 without too much pain.  But RAM is cheap, so
i'd go for it.  Heavy use of swap (virtual memory) is no fun!

> If I understand you, a GNOME or KDE would fill up my existing  192mb
> and force apps into virtual memory thus slowing things down.

Exactly.  I have a gnome desktop now.  My open apps are a web browser, a
terminal, xmms, gaim, and a handful of panel applets.  My system is
using about 300MB right now.  I could save about 40 of that if I killed
nautilus (the gnome file manager) but I do use it occasionaly, and I
have RAM to burn.  So you can see that 192 is right at the limit.  If
you wanted to run OpenOffice, it would probably put you too heavily into
swap.  (There are other office type applications that aren't nearly as
heavy as OpenOffice)

> (or would it crash altogether?) 

Not likely.  When you have a runaway process or something eating lots of
RAM, the kernel will kill off processes to reclaim some RAM.  While far
from ideal, it's better than a hard lockup.

> Additionaly, I speculate that a lighter weight, black screen desktop
> might not be a bad idea as learning process for a 'hatchling" and with
> arrival of a bigger stick I could then upgrade the desktop.  Am I in
> the ballpark?  

Yeah, it depends upon what you want to do.  There are many, many good
options.  The good news is that they'll all co-exist.  So you can try
gnome today, decide that it's too much of a pig, and try fluxbox
tomorrow.  

> Also, the option of pc 133.  Any thoughts?

Yes, my va503+ has a 128MB DIMM of pc133.  One of the things that
originally drew me to this board was its hackability.  There are many
BIOS memory timing options, so I'd guess that you should be able to make
any pc133 DIMM work.  128mb is fine on that system because it doesn't run
X.

I look forward to meeting you -- I only hope we can keep up with your
enthusiasm!


-t