[ILUG] kde and memory

[ray at skynet.ie]

On Mon, 30 Aug 2004, Niall O Broin wrote:
> Given the price of RAM now, 512M isn't a huge amount to have in a 
> desktop machine. I wonder how XP with Office XP, IE and Outlook behaves 
> with 256M of RAM? I don't have such a machine available to test, and I 
> don't really care, but I'm curious.

To satisfy Niall's curiosity:
for most "office" users typing up the odd word document for later mailing 
off via outlook & then checking $WEBMAIL, the the above spec is actually 
ok, however XP seems to suffer the same growing swap use problem as the 
2.4 kernel & this tied to variable sized pagefiles with ye olde NTFS 
fragmentation issues can lead to a constant perception of slowness after 
a couple of months! XP does _need_ to be rebooted at least once week cause 
if ya dont clicking start can lead to some excelent beard growing practice 
before you can do anything productive.

Now
The second that the same user starts to do anything fancy within their 
"environment" such as adding images / tables extra fonts etc etc etc to 
word docs & in particular if they start using powerpoint then XP becomes 
an absolute dog to use with just 256 mem.

Any serious XP based work which in my recent experience has involved those 
heavy into their CAD (Autodesk & Archicad products) and Graphics manibulation 
(Adobe products & Corel draw etc etc), realistically 
requires at least a Gig of Ram to be useable, irrelevant of #CPU speed.

however from what I've seen / dabbled with, 
a linux system with a 2.4 kernel seems to give performance comparable 
to an XP box & the same hardware running a  2.6 kernel seems to perform 
comparable to a win2k (pro) machine.

of course these comparisons are completely based on perception so take 
with as much salt as you see fit! 


ta
	Ray ...