Going deeper into Linux - Speeding up the 'Wreck'

It's amazing how "failures" lead to knowledge sometimes. First, as i wrote in previous posts, Memory Burned my laptops motherboard. I decided not to fix it as motherboards of TX1000 are not 'stable' in time. So, builded a wreck working laptop out of two destroyed ones, but with far lower system specifications than the one i had. So, SPEED issue rose up !

Asus and Acer don't have their UL30JT and 3820TG models ready yet, so i have to stick to the wreck until one of the two is out.

In a way, i was forced into digging for "enhancements" in hardware and software level. In a short period of time i found various tweaks. The two most signicant ones is HDD acoustic management settings and for linux, the XFCE environment ! XFCE was there but i never tried it as i had no reason before. With 'Wreck'... i had to try it!

Let me say that wreck was doing fine with GNOME when running 2~3 programs at the same time... but not more than that. Even with acoustic management set to "SCREAM if you have to, but GIVE ME SPEED!!!" the performance was dropping from good to 'just ok' with some 'poor' moments. So, last night added XFCE in the blend for try-out. And YES ! It rose the speed way up!
I'll stick to XFCE on wrecky since i have no interface lags anymore ! I'm still testing it and don't know the tricks of the new interface yet - but for sure - speed is so much better now and i am still using the same programs (notifications etc) as in gnome environment :)

Hard Disk Performance

I accidentally found a utility today in linux to read/alter technical hard drive parameters. I checked my current drive and as i saw samsung by default had the drive acoustic management setting set to 0

(0 = quiet, 254=speed).

Guess what - i prefer speed over noise ! I changed the value to 254 and got a vast boost in performance ! Viva la linux ! F* uSoft ! :))
Meanwhile, there will be no need to alter any acoustic over performance parameters soon because of the new HDD technology coming out - the Flash based drives, aka SSD (solid state disks)

iPad everywhere! Will you be one more Apple victim ???

You all heard about i-pad. You already know that it doesn't have a camera, a usb port (apart from usb cable to connect it to a PC or MAC), it's not multitasking capable, heavy and not easy to use for long etc. But even what it has, it's problematic. See the link here for users complains about i-pad's wifi.

Meanwhile - see how apple fanatics hide the "truth" from people with camouflage.

"Web performance analyst Gomez says a majority of popular Web sites are optimized for the iPad and deliver faster browsing than on the popular netbook PC category of products".

So, this "analyst" claims that ipad in SOME CASES is faster than netbooks in rendering webpages. It's so stupid claim - because i-pad does NOT render half of the page, which is flash (the reason that netbooks delay is the flash loading process - some flash animations etc are enormous in size (Several MBs have to be transfered from hosting server). But look for yourself here

Computer died !

My TX1000 motherboard died two weeks ago, after testing some clients RAM modules on it !
I had no mobile computing system until today - i "builded" a Laptop out of 2 broken ones given to me by clients (one of them had a broken screen and the other had a burned motherboard).
This system has 512MB of DDR RAM, 1.7GHz Centrino (first generation) processor and 60GB IDE HDD. Well... i thought of installing Ubuntu on it. Well well... if it had decent screen resolution (anything higher than 1024x768) i would keep it for veeeery long since ubuntu 10.04 on it after some recent kernel updates just FLIES ! Almost as i am using my "dead" TURION 64bit 4GB RAM system. I'll stick with this unit until ASUS UL30JT or ACER 3820T comes out. Really, i am very impressed of the performance ! Back in business !