I have set up a dual boot system on my HP Pavilion 733 mhz with 191 megs of ram. I have Windows ME on half of the disk and Suse 9.0 on the other half. I work at home doing clerical work over a network interface with the office. I am on cable internet with the RoadRunner service. In Windows ME I experienced a lot of crashes so I figured I would try to move out of windows to Linux.
However, I have noticed that Suse is really incredibly slow in its internet performance like accessing web pgs or interfacing with the office servers. I have tried different browsers like epihany and mozilla as well as firefox and they are much slower than Internet Explorer when I am in Windows. On the initial install Suse seemed to recognize all my hardware. It found my network card and said internet connection was successful and downloaded the updates as necessary. I find it hard to believe that it would perform worst that Windows ME since that version of Windows is just about the worst one produced. I am just wondering if I am missing something and if anyone might have any ideas on how to increase performance in Suse.

Thanks
Frank

Is it only internet that is slow? Do you have udma enabled?

Hi Bruno Buys

To answer your question. Yes it is the internet that is slow. What is udma? I have no idea what that term means.

Thanks
Frank

Udma is ultra-dma, and dma means direct memory access. Its a way for ide devices to work faster, so to speak.
To check if dma is enabled you can use the command hdparm, in the console, as root. If you
hdparm /dev/hda
it will list some info about the hda device. If you really wanna see detailed info, use
hdparm -I /dev/hda

To enable dma transfer to hda, for example, do
hdparm -d 1 /dev/hda


But, although checking won't do no harm, if suse is not slow as a whole, just internet, there is little chance its a dma problem. Instead, you should do some research on topics like dns servers from roadrunner, network connection and eth card drivers.

Hi bruno buys

Thanks for the information I will look into the topics you suggested.

Thanks
Frank