[TriLUG] OT: hardware question

Andrew Perrin andrew_perrin at unc.edu
Tue Mar 26 08:26:28 EST 2002


Sorry if this is too far off-topic.

I've got an old machine into which I'd like to breathe some new life. It's
a Pentium 200, and runs debian fine including X.  It does get slow,
though, and when I use top to figure out why, it looks like the real
bottleneck is memory; it's got 96M. When things get slow, load average
gets to around 1.3 and the top CPU hog is generally kswapd, which makes me
think it's actually the swapping that's taxing the system. 

So... I'm thinking of adding some memory to the system. A couple of
questions:

1.) Does this sound like a reasonable way to handle it, given the
situation I've described?
2.) Is there any sensible way of figuring out the biggest SIMM the
motherboard will accept? Currently it's got two 32M and two 16M SIMMs; I'd
like to replace the 16M's with 128M's if the board will handle it, so I'd
end up with a total of 320MB. I don't have the MB documentation anymore,
and the company I bought it from (for whom I used to work) is now
bankrupt.

Thanks for any advice.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew J Perrin - andrew_perrin at unc.edu - http://www.unc.edu/~aperrin
 Assistant Professor of Sociology, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
      269 Hamilton Hall, CB#3210, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3210 USA





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