Advice on possible use of TC on old Dell laptop

[lha_user]

Hi,

I just wonder if someone can advice me on to install (or not) TC on
an old Dell Latitude laptop (Latitude CPi).
I have 256 mb ram and can set a swap of say, 500 mb.
I am currently running DSL on this laptop with a CF instead
of HD, and it works quite OK.
As more and more websites I use are using flash and all kind
of memoryhugging gadgets. I must either throw away the laptop
or try to use TC in order to have Flash.

Q1: I doubt that 256 mb + swap is enough for a smooth working of
Opera and Flash and a few other basic tools, like ndiswrapper
for my PCMCIA WIFI card and so on. Right or wrong ?

Q2: I know that this Dell have problems with ACPI and some
bugs in its BIOS. When running TC 2.10 I can see in dmesg that
there are indeed a couple of errors concerning this.
Anyway, TC is running fine from CD so my question is: should I bother ?

(most anxious about the fan control but my guess is that the (buggy) BIOS
will handle that....)

Any comments and/or suggestions are welcome !

[curaga]

1) Depends on what flash thingies you use. Games should be fine, as should short videos. Longer videos might have trouble.

2) If they don't affect usage, you can ignore them.

If you're only thinking of youtube, you can do without flash with an userscript. The one I'm thinking of changes the vid to a wmv embed, and adds download links.

[thane]

I'd be interested in hearing more about the userscript.

Flash works poorly on my TC box (Pentium III) and YouTube etc. seem to be making it more and more difficult to download content to play locally.

[curaga]

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/50771

Should work in all major browsers, I use it in Opera. I don't have mplayerplugin or similar, so I only get the download links, but that's way better than normal youtube

[thane]

Thanks.

[combo3]

I'm currently running Tinycore 2.10 with Opera 10 on a Cpi R400GT (128 MB/5 GB HD/wireless card), and it works great.

To overcome the memory limitation, I use swap + persistent home, though in your case, this may shorten the life of your flash card. My only problem is that the processor is sometimes too slow for rendering flash videos.

[MakodFilu]

The same here. I use TC 2.10 in a Fujitsu-Siemens - 128MB - P3-500Mhz.

Currently, using only swap and no persistent home, just for testing. Firefox works reasonably well with 2-3 open tabs, but lags if more than one of those is an AJAX-heavy site (GMail, Facebook). Youtube videos drop some frames, but mplayer plays those ok if you don't use -zoom.

[batnas]

I have installed MC on a thinstation:
16MB DoM
64MB RAM (+128MB SWAP, but not used very much)
300 Mhz

I do not run Xorg.
Instead i use as a webserver, currently able to run php and mysql.
This is just fun, as you can kill it by refresh a web page 10 times


\\Batnas

[tclfan]

Hi,

I just wonder if someone can advice me on to install (or not) TC on
an old Dell Latitude laptop (Latitude CPi).
I have 256 mb ram and can set a swap of say, 500 mb.
I am currently running DSL on this laptop with a CF instead
of HD, and it works quite OK.
As more and more websites I use are using flash and all kind
of memoryhugging gadgets. I must either throw away the laptop
or try to use TC in order to have Flash.

It is not a throwaway laptop! If you end up not successful with TC, you can always run Windows XP on it just fine... I would optimize it a bit after installing to maximize performance, such as disable useless services and flashy effects and turn off indexing. I have run XP on as little as 64M ram after optimizing and 256M was plenty to include flash, etc..

[sandras]

Swap space seems to help TC a lot in performance. I tried running TC with persistent home mounted extensions but without swap and it was quite sluggish. Added 500M swap (my ram is 256M) and everything is fine. As I'm writing this the system is using ~100MB swap. Skype. Transmission and VLC are running. Swap saves the day. : )

edit: I'm also I'm copying openbox.tcz, tint2.tcz, pcmanfm.tcz, minefield.tcz, gtk2.tcz, libglade.tcz, libstartup-notification.tcz and libxcb-util.tcz to ram. the system is quite snappy.

edit2: The processor is AMD Athlon 1600Mhz.

[lha_user]

Thanks all for the feedback !

You gave me some things to think about...
Regarding CFcards and lifetime: Yeah, I know thats something to consider. The
problems seems to be that  nobody really knows how bad(or good) it is..Given  a write lifetime
of 10.000 times and the wear-levelling built into the controller  one can, perhaps, count on
a higher amount of  writes in reality?? Anyone heard of someone actually breaking a CF card by exessive
writes caused by swapping??? The cards ar so cheap that I can make a couple of spare installs to keep as
reserves.


Yes, I will keep the Laptop and I will install TC (not XP...), on CF, but first I have to catch up on the
different modes of operation, I must admit that i am a little bit confused of the new mode
descriptions. My last install was TC 2.10 on a desktop PC...Things have changed a LOT since then.

Thanks again - I will let you know how it went by.