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350 PII, 64M Ram, 15GB Win 98, 6GB RH 7.0: System runs slow at times and begins to page to the hard drive when running Linux. System works fine when running windows. What is going on and how can I fix this?
Distribution: Slackware 10, Fedora Core 3, Mac OS X
Posts: 617
Rep:
this is quite a strange problem. when you installed, did you make a large enough swap disk? it should really be twice your ram (although i hear reports that ne bigger than 128 and it starts to get pointless [so ive heard])
if you don't have one (naughty you) or its a bit small then you'll have to search the how-tos to find the relevant information to make it bigger.
or it might be that lilo isn;t telling the rest of the computor that you have 64 mb of ram. i think that if you stick into lilo.conf
mem=64
it might recognise all your ram but im not sure if this is true and i can;t find the book where it said that (dont try it unless you have a decent boot disk you can use if something gets screwed)
Do you have an DMA hard drive? If so is DMA enabled? On my system turning on DMA transfers for new Western Digital hard drive made a HUGE difference in terms of system responsiveness.
Re: Here is something (sorta of off the wall) to try
Quote:
Originally posted by Rimmer Do you have an DMA hard drive? If so is DMA enabled? On my system turning on DMA transfers for new Western Digital hard drive made a HUGE difference in terms of system responsiveness.
Rimmer
I have a WD also. I'm not sure about the DMA. Would this be somthing to check in SETUP?
Read through the man file for hdparm (by typing "man hdparm" at the command line). I think "hdparm /dev/hda" should give you some information on the settings for your drive. You might get better results if you build a nice new 2.4.2 kernel before playing with hdparm (I haven't used hdparm on a 2.2.X kernel).
Rimmer
PS - I suspect most distributions don't use DMA by default (my Redhat 7.0 didn't)
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