[ale] Laptop too slow

[Joe Knapka]

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