Improving performance on older pc's?

[MuckSavage]

I have an old Celeron 700 that I took home from work. I threw in a new NIC (the on-board one crapped out), a 512mb ram stick and a 40gb maxtor drive I had laying around. The install went flawlessly, (FC 3) and everything works just fine. It is quite sluggish, however. I realize that the processor is pretty old, but are there any suggestions for speeding things up? I typically use gnome, but I also installed Xfce and it was much snappier, but I didn't play with it much. I also turned off a lot of services I wasn't using. Does anybody have any other suggestions? Thanks in advance!

[AliOop]

MuckSavage, 700 MHz processor is a hell of alot faster that my 550MHz. And you have twice the ram. Maybe you mean the browser is slow to render a page? If that is the problem search this forum on IPV6. Don't know much about it but if you comment it out, your browser will work much faster. It has something to do with a new web addressing scheme. As to what other things run slow? I can't help you there. But with the old peice of junk I have, preformance is pretty snappy with FC2 and Gnome.

[james_in_denver]

Sounds like you have pretty much done what you can to "tune up" your machine without purchasing new hardware. AliOop had a suggestion that sounds worthy of more research.

If it's web-browsing that is slow, you might consider setting up a "local caching" nameserver. (that will speed up hostname lookups by a HUGE factor over not using a local nameserver).

Also, since you are running a 700 Mhz celeron processor, I would expect that to be somewhat slower than a 550 Mhz athlon for most tasks. The Celeron is really kind of a "crippled" processor.

You might consider buying a new motherboard/CPU combo, you can probably find somthing close to a 1.8 ghz athlon processor/mobo on E-bay for around 80-100 bucks (U.S.). Just make sure that it has the same "memory" format for your current memory sticks, swap out mobo's, and you are up and running with a system about 6-7 times faster than what you have now.

One last parting thought, what type of video card do you have? and how much memory does it have?
That can make a pretty big difference in the speed of X-windows.

Hope that helps.

[imdeemvp]

Redhat/Fedora is known for consuming ram. I love gnome but it is another ram eater. I would suggest using xfce or a distro like vector linux that focus on older pcs.

[wapgeek]

yes xfce is fine, i started usin that lately. pmpl