On Mon, 3 Oct 2005 10:25:13 -0700, William "Chops" Westfield wrote:

> Which "gui desktop" is best for slow cpus and small systems, anyway?
> 
> (If you stick with non-gui stuff (even including lots of xterms with
> occasional buttons and menus), you don't need anywhere near 266MHz...)

Well I like OS/2 for its low resource requirements, among a *lot* of other things (Declaring Interest: I even 
sell it!  http://www.ecomstation.co.uk)

Until a couple of weeks ago I'd been using a Thinkpad 380z (Pentium II 300MHz, 160MB memory) as my "everyday" 
machine under OS/2, using it for email, web browsing, Lotus Organizer, spreadsheets, the odd bit of word 
processing, viewing pictures uploaded from a digital camera, all the usual stuff.  Its performance was fine, 
the limitation was the memory (160MB was the maximum on that machine) and I was filling its 12GB disk, so I 
have finally moved on to a Thinkpad T23 (1.13GHz, 1GB memory, 30GB disk) so I have more room now!  Previously 
I'd get swapping when more than a couple of Lotus programs were running, or a dozen of anyone else's :-)  If 
only they'd fitted a second memory slot to the 380z, I may well have carried on using it much longer.  It is a 
1-lump machine with floppy and CD drives permanently installed, whereas the later models only allow one 
removeable drive inside at once so you have to carry extra parts.  But I digress...

I can't say that the speed improvement is dramatic - it's noticeable with things like reindexing vast email 
folders (with 5,000+ messages in them), but normal stuff like web browsing, retrieving/reading/writing emails 
and so on is pretty much the same.  You soon get used to the speed of the machine you use, no matter how fast 
it is (that's Howard's Law of Upgrades :-)  It's only if it's too slow for you to work at your own pace that 
it's a problem.

Cheers,


Howard Winter
St.Albans, England


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