I'm not sure what gave me this idea, but I decided to comment out the swap partition in /etc/fstab and reboot my laptop. I did not run swapoff directly at any time.

I'm running more things now than I would ever dream of to hammer my 500MB of memory, but I still notice NO slowdown. This is the best desktop experience I've ever had for any OS on any hardware!

Here's the first 12 lines in top (CPU)

top - 22:57:28 up 2:06, 1 user, load average: 1.11, 0.89, 0.88 Tasks: 97 total, 2 running, 95 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 20.2%us, 2.9%sy, 0.0%ni, 76.2%id, 0.0%wa, 0.1%hi, 0.6%si, 0.0%st Mem: 449556k total, 441840k used, 7716k free, 9420k buffers Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 159416k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 2921 root 15 0 227m 69m 7312 S 16.2 15.9 22:41.70 X 3317 finley 15 0 240m 25m 8684 S 3.1 5.8 2:32.73 xine 3204 finley 15 0 2160 772 564 S 2.2 0.2 2:02.71 top 3100 finley 15 0 183m 51m 16m S 0.8 11.7 5:03.90 firefox-bin 3116 finley 15 0 223m 39m 2440 S 0.4 8.9 0:54.26 java_vm 3264 finley 15 0 32276 9788 7132 S 0.3 2.2 0:23.74 kpat 3050 finley 15 0 33676 10m 7572 R 0.2 2.3 0:21.28 konsole 3049 finley 15 0 32080 7620 5668 S 0.1 1.7 0:01.62 kscd 3399 finley 15 0 57024 25m 16m S 0.1 5.7 0:08.55 konqueror 1 root 15 0 2028 480 392 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.29 init 2 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 migration/0 3 root 34 19 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.06 ksoftirqd/0

Here's the top 12 lines (Mem)

top - 22:58:41 up 2:07, 1 user, load average: 1.14, 0.92, 0.89 Tasks: 97 total, 3 running, 94 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 25.3%us, 2.9%sy, 0.0%ni, 71.5%id, 0.0%wa, 0.4%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Mem: 449556k total, 442156k used, 7400k free, 9648k buffers Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 159160k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 2921 root 16 0 227m 69m 7312 R 20.9 15.9 22:55.56 X 3100 finley 15 0 183m 51m 16m S 0.4 11.7 5:05.54 firefox-bin 3116 finley 15 0 223m 39m 2440 S 0.4 8.9 0:54.60 java_vm 3253 finley 15 0 198m 34m 9.8m S 0.0 7.9 0:07.97 swriter.bin 3317 finley 15 0 240m 25m 8684 S 2.9 5.8 2:35.17 xine 3399 finley 15 0 57024 25m 16m S 0.0 5.7 0:08.57 konqueror 3638 finley 15 0 93632 23m 15m S 0.0 5.4 0:03.80 gaim 3026 finley 15 0 35180 13m 10m S 0.0 3.1 0:05.42 kded 3336 finley 15 0 34232 11m 8776 S 0.0 2.7 1:01.01 kuickshow 3038 finley 15 0 35096 11m 8828 S 0.0 2.7 0:23.91 kicker 3050 finley 15 0 33676 10m 7844 R 0.4 2.4 0:21.53 konsole 3264 finley 15 0 32276 9808 7152 S 0.0 2.2 0:23.85 kpat

As you can see, I'm running a KDE environment. I'm going to try this in a gnome environment tomorrow.

This is on an HP Pavillion ze4800 I purchased at WalMart a bit over two years ago for ~$900.

From dmesg:

AMD mobile AMD Athlon(tm) XP2800+ Memory: 447836k/457664k available

Linux info: [finley@c182 ~]$ cat /etc/issue CentOS release 5 (Final) Kernel \r on an \m

[finley@c182 ~]$ uname -a Linux c182.pnd.net 2.6.18-8.1.6.el5 #1 SMP Thu Jun 14 17:46:09 EDT 2007 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux

Hope this makes someone else's day!

Steve Finley