It has a big positive effect, because it enables much more efficient buffering and i/o in the VM and disk subsystem. The down side was if you were running NFS over UDP over an unreliable network, in which case the performance fell off a cliff, but no one runs NFS over UDP anymore, and when the read and write buffers are packed into a TCP data stream, it doesn't make any difference to the network how big they are - it's not aware of them at all.
Not in my experience. The lockup I got locks the keyboard and makes it ignore mouse clicks.
I've had to remote SSH in to kill processes. I ended up changing the window manager; I've also had to uninstall the SMB client. Luckily I have experts around me who can help.
Despite the hype I find Ubuntu just as flakey as Windows; possibly even more so.
Given your symptoms, including X freezing out the keyboard and mouse, I'd wager good money that you have a hardware fault, most likely iffy or outright bad memory. One that Windows doesn't 'tickle' because it's less demanding of the hardware or uses different areas of memory. Other possible causes are an iffy graphics card or bad capacitors on the motherboard:
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I'd suggest making as Memtest86+ boot CD or USB stick and running it overnight. Some Linux distros also offer the option of running a memory test when you boot off CD or USB.
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M$ offers some s**te called the Windows Memory Diagnostic, but the memory has to be in a pretty bad way for it to find anything wrong, and more often than not memory in a bad way will prevent the machine from booting in the first place.
It's the subtle, intermittent memory errors when the machine is worked hard that cause weird symptoms in operation. If they're there, Memtest86+ will usually find them.
Nope sorry. That depends on what window manager you choose to use.
Not my experience. For preference I agree and prefer Mint - in fact I use it on two machines here - but it is a little bloated for an old machine. On very old equipment, I usually use Puppy, but it's nowhere near as easy to configure or administer as Mint.
It's OK with a Gig, but only OK. As with windows, the more RAM you throw at it, the better it works.
Horses for courses - Mint is a great replacement for windows, but it doesn't suit everyone, and is certainly not ideal on low spec equipment.
Soi this rather busy desktop is running with 4GB in use. nearly all; of that is sodding firefox, the rest is skype and thunderbird..
And they don't change no matter what distro you use
The xserver doesnt change thats around 300MB - only the window manager, and here mate is taking up a measly 200MB. The rest is a load of applets I keep running
I found it better than a stripped down linux . As I said, you need a kernel and an X server no mater what display manager you run, and loading up e.g. firefoix is the worst ram eater that you will have to deal with
My EEEPC suffers more from running short of CPU breath and a terminally slow flash disk card then it does from lack of RAM
Memtest86+ is free, small, and painless -- though one should let it run for a few hours or overnight. If it find errors, I'd try reseating the memory: remove and replace the modules.
If the problem persists, probably best just to dump the hardware, unless it's an absolutely nonessential computer with no data of value. (Someone, possibly here, posted that result of disk defragmentation on a PC with bad memory was widespread file corruption...).
Bad memory will lead to endless trouble and aggravation otherwise. Computers, no matter whether Linux or Windows, lead to trouble and aggravation without memory errors, but that is one problem that can be easily excluded. And no computer with bad memory will work...
It's got parity checked memory. It's unlikely a RAM fault would cause similar faults repeatedly - though I suppose it could be the graphics card. The new window manager developed an interesting one - there was no mouse cursor on the middle screen. Everything worked, you just couldn't see the cursor.
Still, I've been using it 18 months (from new), it's probably knackered. Certainly the cheap keyboard is dying, must get a decent one!
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