[ale] X and desktop redraws

James P. Kinney III jkinney at localnetsolutions.com
Thu Jan 9 10:12:27 EST 2003


Odds are the laptop is using shared RAM for the graphics. That lowers
the ram you have for the main system. Moving a window will take some CPU
muscle. You can reduce the RAM (in bios) that the graphics sub-system is
getting. Also, you may have loads of stuff running that is eating up
resources you don't need. 

The nvidia driver is good at delivering graphics to the screen, but it
takes some RAM to load the module. Also, ceck to see if the desktop
environment is "up to date". Gnome is particularly sluggish in window
moves sometimes. You may be able to reset the move specs to use
wireframe on moves and resizes to cut down of CPU requirements. 



On Thu, 2003-01-09 at 09:27, jb at sourceillustrated.com wrote:
> Guys,
> 
> On my new laptop, I've noticed that if I drag a window along the desktop,
> the CPU usage spikes and redraws go very slowly.  Moving windows seems to
> take a lot of CPU power.  In addition, some of the screensavers redraw
> sluggishly as well (can see refresh lines).
> 
> This is a P4 2.0 ghz, Geforce 4 32 mb with the nvidia driver installed, so
> it's got the muscle.  My work machine (P4 1 ghz) doesn't have this problem
> with the same background display, and it's only got a 16 mb integrated
> intel chipset.
> 
> Is there some X setting I need to modify to remedy this?  Could this be
> the result of a buggy driver?  What else should I investigate?
> 
> Also, could the Dell Inspiron i8200 owners verify if this happens on your
> machine?
> 
> Thanks guys.
> 
> John
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
-- 
James P. Kinney III   \Changing the mobile computing world/
President and CEO      \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244             \.___________________________./

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics) <jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7 



 This is a digitally signed message part




More information about the Ale mailing list