[TriLUG] OT: hardware question

[John F Davis]

IMHO, the benefits of extra ram follow a diminishing returns curve.  i.e,
You will see more improvement
when you upgrade from 16 MB of memory to 32MB than when you upgrade from
96MB to 192MB.
If you were to have 128MB of memory in that box, you might see a little
improvement but not a lot (if any).
Now, on the other hand if you are running gimp, netbeans, and other memory
hogs at the same time
you might see a improvement.

Considering the price old edo simms (I don't know, but I imagine they are
expensive), I would venture to say
you will be better offspending money on a new cpu.

JD


Andrew Perrin <andrew_perrin at unc.edu>@trilug.org on 03/26/2002 08:26:28 AM

Please respond to trilug at trilug.org

Sent by:    trilug-admin at trilug.org


To:    trilug at trilug.org
cc:
Subject:    [TriLUG] OT: hardware question



Sorry if this is too far off-topic.

I've got an old machine into which I'd like to breathe some new life. It's
a Pentium 200, and runs debian fine including X.  It does get slow,
though, and when I use top to figure out why, it looks like the real
bottleneck is memory; it's got 96M. When things get slow, load average
gets to around 1.3 and the top CPU hog is generally kswapd, which makes me
think it's actually the swapping that's taxing the system.

So... I'm thinking of adding some memory to the system. A couple of
questions:

1.) Does this sound like a reasonable way to handle it, given the
situation I've described?
2.) Is there any sensible way of figuring out the biggest SIMM the
motherboard will accept? Currently it's got two 32M and two 16M SIMMs; I'd
like to replace the 16M's with 128M's if the board will handle it, so I'd
end up with a total of 320MB. I don't have the MB documentation anymore,
and the company I bought it from (for whom I used to work) is now
bankrupt.

Thanks for any advice.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew J Perrin - andrew_perrin at unc.edu - http://www.unc.edu/~aperrin
 Assistant Professor of Sociology, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
      269 Hamilton Hall, CB#3210, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3210 USA


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