Slow/hard disk freaking out

[ghopper]

I installed Red Hat Linux 7.3 on a spare hard drive a few days ago. I use GNOME. Occasionally (not constantly), when I do something (via GNOME) that shouldn't (ha ha) need much memory, the hard drive starts whirring and the system gets reaaaaally slow.

Further info: 500 mHz, 64MB ram. It should be able to handle a web browser and windows manager!

I am thinking perhaps I'm having a similar problem to this guy's: http://linuxnewbie.org/forum/register.php?a=act&u=35960&i=17146395

So the question is, how do I determine what is causing this? What are the possibilities, and where can I read up on how to rule out the possibilities?

TIA,
ghopper

[mdwatts]

There have been a few threads posted recently (last day or so) about the same problem with quite a few suggestions on how to speed up your system.

I would suggest you try some of those suggestions.

BTW... 64mb is not very much for Redhat 7.3 as it would be roughly the same as running W2K on the same box.

BTW2... The url you included does not work.

[medrewsclues]

also although maybe not relevant, if you put a hard drive on the same ide as a cd you will get slowness.

[ghopper]

Thanks for the replies. I paid close attention to a system monitor program and discovered that, when I used too many programs at once, I totally maxed out my "physical memory" and started using more and more of my swap space--so much that it required more system resources than I could muster just to close windows! It has done that before and crashed the system once.

So, clearly it's a ram deficiency. The book I was following didn't mention anything about a 128MB minimum requirement for Redhat 7.3. So I bought some ram: $25 for 128MB at Crucial.

Thanks!

--ghopper

[ghopper]

Please see this thread (http://www.linuxnewbie.org/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=62296) for a follow-up.

--ghopper