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desperanceThis desktop? Is having more trouble with its memory than I do, and that is really saying something.
All right, so it only has a gigabyte ("only"! hah! I remember when a megabyte was a huge amount, unthinkable...); but I only ask it to process words and browse LJ, to deal with my mail and dodge around on the internet a little. One gig should be plenty.
And yet, these last few days, by the end of the day it's been choking up so thoroughly it becomes literally unusable; it can take minutes to respond to a key or a mouse command. When I look at the memory usage, it reckons to have only 10MB free, with 150MB or thereabouts of cache; and the hard disk is running perpetually; and all I can do is fretfully and painstakingly close it down. Which I just had to do in the middle of the day, yet, which means it's getting worse...
I have no idea what's changed, given that nothing has in either the set-up or my usage of it. Granted I'm editing a full-length manuscript just now, but that's only a MB or so, it shouldn't be causing all this sweat and breakdown.
And I don't know what to do about it. There's probably some swift command to flush the cache, which would presumably help short-term, if I only knew it; but do I need more memory, or do I need to sort out my installation, or what? (I run Suse 10.2; I have been intending to upgrade to 11.1, but it's such a radical rewrite they recommend a whole new installation rather than upgrading. Which would be nice and clean and corretive; but causes me to worry about my data, esp as I have not yet figured out how to copy my entire current set-up onto the waiting external hard drive, prior to such a radical reinstall. Damn, why am I so much less of a geek than I ought to be...?)
All right, so it only has a gigabyte ("only"! hah! I remember when a megabyte was a huge amount, unthinkable...); but I only ask it to process words and browse LJ, to deal with my mail and dodge around on the internet a little. One gig should be plenty.
And yet, these last few days, by the end of the day it's been choking up so thoroughly it becomes literally unusable; it can take minutes to respond to a key or a mouse command. When I look at the memory usage, it reckons to have only 10MB free, with 150MB or thereabouts of cache; and the hard disk is running perpetually; and all I can do is fretfully and painstakingly close it down. Which I just had to do in the middle of the day, yet, which means it's getting worse...
I have no idea what's changed, given that nothing has in either the set-up or my usage of it. Granted I'm editing a full-length manuscript just now, but that's only a MB or so, it shouldn't be causing all this sweat and breakdown.
And I don't know what to do about it. There's probably some swift command to flush the cache, which would presumably help short-term, if I only knew it; but do I need more memory, or do I need to sort out my installation, or what? (I run Suse 10.2; I have been intending to upgrade to 11.1, but it's such a radical rewrite they recommend a whole new installation rather than upgrading. Which would be nice and clean and corretive; but causes me to worry about my data, esp as I have not yet figured out how to copy my entire current set-up onto the waiting external hard drive, prior to such a radical reinstall. Damn, why am I so much less of a geek than I ought to be...?)