Hi, You may not have to replace your old computer. The biggest, cheapest boost you can give an ageing computer is more RAM. 2GB is tiny by today's standards. I use GKrellM http://freecode.com/projects/gkrellm to watch the free memory, swap usage and swap rate, and disk I/O rates. When your computer is running slow, look at the little graphs to see which resource is slowing things down. Then you can make informed decisions about what needs improving. Keep away from swap! Avoiding re-reading from disk using memory buffer caching. CPU speed, RAM size, disk size etc have been following Moore's law and getting better all the time, but disk rotation and seek times have not. Ideally, you want to read some file in from disk _once_ after you boot, and not have to re-read it if you run that program again. For example, if you use DDR2 RAM, add a 4GB kit for $56 http://www.msy.com.au/product.jsp?productId=5312 Or, if you use DDR3 RAM, add a 4GB kit for $32 http://www.msy.com.au/product.jsp?productId=5177 === If buying a new computer, give it at least 8GB DDR3 for $62. http://www.msy.com.au/product.jsp?productId=5177 If you feel the need for speed, you could put your root partition on a SSD, or use a motherboard that uses a SSD to transparently cache a normal disk. You shouldn't be swapping, so don't put that on the SSD :-) John On 21 April 2013 12:55, David Zuccaro <david.zuccaro@optusnet.com.au> wrote:
Hi,
I'd like to get a new desktop computer system; I'm currently using a 1.8 GHz C2D with 2 GB of memory with debian squeeze. It doesn't seem up to the job any more; HD movies are choppy; iceweasel is sluggish.
I use my computer system for typical desktop reasons:
Gnome Internet browsing Evolution mail client amarok Watching movies Basic image processing with gimp.
I'm thinking of getting something along the lines of:
i7 3.4 GHz 4GB DDR3 2 TB HD Graphics card.
I'll probably stick with debian but I might try out ubuntu and linux mint distros.
Does this sound reasonable?
Any suggestions or recommendations?
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