[ale] Laptop too slow

[Mark Wright]

Excellent idea.  I thought it was odd to only see one cache but I  
haven't stayed up on cpu specs for 15 years.  I'll check that and let  
you know.

thanks

Mark
On Oct 25, 2005, at 4:34 PM, Joe Knapka wrote:

> Mark Wright <mpwright at speedfactory.net> writes:
>
>
>> Hi All,
>>
>> In my role as computer super hero to my friends in the clutches of
>> the evil empire I get to wipe failing windows installations a lot.  I
>> have a friend's comaq laptop with a AMD processor  running a little
>> over 500 mhz and 28 meg of ram.  Win 98 had gotten so twisted it
>> would boot and hang.  Virus checker was negative but that was just
>> for fun, the formatter was coming no matter.
>>
>> After installing ubuntu 5.10 and adding 128 M of mem the laptop runs
>> but is very slow.  Slower than (or as) a 266 mhz laptop I keep
>> around.  I ran memtest on it first and after the memory install and
>> the hardware seems OK.  Memtest does report that the AMD processor
>> has only L1 cache and no L2.  Is this right or is the cpu broke?
>>
>
> If L2 is disabled, the machine will be dramatically slower.  I used to
> run a firewall on a 75MHz Pentium with blown L2 cache (I "know" this
> because it would not boot, nor pass Memtest86, with L2 enabled), and
> my 25MHz 486 was faster.
>
> I disabled the L2 on that machine using the "BIOS features" page of
> the CMOS setup utility. You might check there for a similar setting on
> your laptop.
>
> Cheers,
>
> -- J Knapka
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