How to make KDE faster for weak computer?

[Lanzi]

I am building an old computer (P4 2600 Mhz HT, 2GByte memory) for a friend in Italy. He will mainly use it as a surfstation, write email, see some of his Fotos... no special stuff at all.

I talked the other day to agaida and he recommended to install razor with Kwin. But my fried is used to KDE (even if he does not know a lot about computers, he prefers his linux over his old Windows XP) :-)

So, I installed KDE today, and it feels really a bit slow. its okay, but I would prefer it a little bit faster.
So what can I do to makle it faster:

What I alreday did:
- deactivate NEPOMUK
- deactive desktopeffects
- remove nfs, samba, mdadm

What else could I do?

[melmarker]

use razor?
new hardware?
preload activated?
readahead proper configured?

[ayla]

Hi Lanzi,

new hardware?

I speeded up an old P4 a lot by buying a small ssd (watch the connector) and for greater and not often needed amounts of data an usb-case for the now free hdd.

Greets
ayla

[Lanzi]

I don't want to spend any money on this machine :-D

Maybe there are some more things to deactivate or remove?

@Alf: How do I check preloads?

[melmarker]

i think that preload is activated per default - if you have 2G it can be cool to install readahead-fedora (good for mechanical drives)

[bluelupo]

Hi Lanzi,
use an lightweigt eMail client like trojita (only IMAP) instead of kmail.

Repository: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/jkt-gentoo:/trojita/Debian_7.0/

[Lanzi]

Thanks for your hints and tips. 

[UP2L8]

@Lanzi...

Give SolydK a try, if for nothing else to see what they do that you can do to your Siduction KDE install.  SolydK is supposed to be a lean KDE distro.

http://solydxk.com

I confused SolydK with PCLinuxOS KDE MiniMe:

http://www.pclinuxos.com/get-pclinuxos/kde/

Just understand that PCLinuxOS is an RPM-based distro.  Weird thing is they've modified APT and Synaptic to work with RPMs.

[musca]

Hello,

@UP2L8, i seriously doubt that changing the distribution to some other random KDE4 distribution would gain more speed.

@lanzi, I feel with you as i myself own such an old P4 (3.4 Ghz, 2 GB)  and even a "newer" Radeon HD2600 vga card with 512 MB RAM for the AGP slot (no PCI express). I think it really is wonderful open source development that enables such old machines to still execute newest releases.  Windows 8 just dropped support for those cpus that don't have the nx, pae and sse2 flags.

Yes, don't spent any money on that 12 year old thing and better find some 8 year old dual core system for your friend.
Many WinXP users are dumping theese nowadays and it should be possible to get one for lowest price.

greetings
musca

[dibl]

@UP2L8, i seriously doubt that changing the distribution to some other random KDE4 distribution would gain more speed.

Actually, there is one that is designed to be very, very light -- slax.  I have not tried it in some years, but the last time I ran it, it was quite light and fast, considering the limits of the old hardware.  They stayed with KDE 3.x for a long time, but the picture shows KDE4 now.


Of course it's not Debian, but if a person only wanted to do browsing and e-mail on an ancient PC, maybe that would be a reasonable solution.

[LRC1962]

You could check with this site http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_Linux_distribution.
Most light weight distros stay away from KDE because it is known for being the heavy weight of all desktops.
See this for other options https://l3net.wordpress.com/2013/12/17/four-lightweight-desktops-for-opensuse-13-1/.

[Lanzi]

Thanks to you all for your support.
I finally installed KDE for my friend on the old machine and it works well. Its not superfat, but fast enough. Even tough, he is defenetly not a power user, some faceook, some digicam-photos watching ecc.

I brought the computer to Italy, where he lives and used it as well for two weeks and I was surprised how stable and reliable the old hardware with Linux works.
I connected an old HP-Printer, DVD-device and a wifi-Adapter from t-link. Everything worked fine!
So lets grss fingers, that the harddisk will survive the hot summer :-D

Thanks to everybody!