My laptop charger died so I have been using my old desktop for a while now at home. This is a 1 GHz machine with 350MB of RAM running Debian. At first I was a bit worried that the system wouldn’t support my working habits because of the low RAM but while using it I have realized that Debian works great with ~378MB of RAM. Obviously the system is not as responsive as it would be with 1GB of RAM but its definitely usable.<\/p>\n
Actually it works fine with 250MB also, as my 128 MB RAM chip died I had to take it out and I could still use the system with a single 250MB chip. This is with Firefox (with upto 8-10 tabs), Thunderbird, uTorrent (using wine), Konqueror and Konsole (multiple sessions) running. I could even watch videos without issues. Though a couple of times I did have to close Firefox when viewing a video because the video would take ages to startup.<\/p>\n
The main issue I had during this time was with Firefox. I found that I would have to restart it after using it for a while (day or so) or when I went to a page with a lot of flash. It used an average of about 130MB of RAM on my system. At times it went up to 60% usage on 378MB (according to top). [Don’t feel like calculating it right now]<\/p>\n
Flash was a pain during this time. Pages with a lot of Flash slowed the system down to a crawl. So it looks like a lot of the memory leakage\/excessive memory use in Firefox has to do with the Flash plugin in use.<\/p>\n
If this machine was running XP or any other flavor of windows apart from 98\/95 etc it would have been completely unusable. I did try booting into windows XP on this system to do some OCR (I can’t seem to find a good OCR client in Linux) but the system was pretty much unusable with about 2-5 second wait while opening windows etc.<\/p>\n
My usage is a lot more intensive than most regular users so for a normal user Linux will be even more responsive. I mean does average Joe have 10 Tabs open at the same time while OpenOffice is converting a 95 MB document to HTML? (Don’t ask. It was a PDF converted to .doc which I needed in html) Oh and I usually listen to music when I work so Amarok was also running in the background at the time.<\/p>\n
BTW, in case you are wondering I am running KDE v3.5.10 so its not an old version and most of the effects are still on (Except for the transparent panel, which I find annoying)<\/p>\n
Another thing I learnt was that USB transfers take longer if you have low RAM for some reason. Atleast they do when you are using a USB pendrive, my external harddisk seems to work with the same speed even with low RAM.<\/p>\n
So if you have an old machine, don’t throw it. Install Linux on it and donate it to someone or use it as a extra server or something. <\/p>\n
– Suramya<\/p>\n
PS: I have finally upgraded the RAM on this system to 1GB so it works even better. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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