I received an old HP Pavilian tx 100 laptop. It has an AMD Turion 64 X2 Mobile TL-64 CPU, GeForce Go 6150, 2GB RAM and a 5k rpm hard drive. The performance has been reasonably close to what I expected under Vista and the kubuntu live DVD, which I think uses the open source nouveau driver, but when I installed kubuntu and switch to NVIDIA's proprietary driver, KDE became pretty much unusable.
It started with a default driver of nvidia-173. This was so bad that every time I wanted X Windows to update, I had to switch to a different virtual terminal and back. I updated to the nvidia-current-updates driver. It functions, but it's about the worst computer performance I've seen (and I've put computers through rough paces). It takes several seconds to respond to any input and the animation for the start menu opening is slow enough to time with a stop watch. I dread trying to use the system under any sort of load. The xorg.conf file is pretty standard, and I don't know if I did anything beyond maybe adding a line to explicitly use the NVIDIA driver. I certainly didn't do anything before seeing such terrible performance.
It's not easy to do much in X Windows on the machine, so help that I can use from a console will be appreciated. I have quite a lot of Linux experience (dating back to 1997 and compiling kernels), but this has me stumped. I'm used to hardware just working when I configure the drivers. I've seen questions about a possible conflict with the broadcom wi-fi nic, but I do not have the drivers installed. The card rarely even shows up in a hardware search under Windows or Linux, and I've been using wired networking.
It started with a default driver of nvidia-173. This was so bad that every time I wanted X Windows to update, I had to switch to a different virtual terminal and back. I updated to the nvidia-current-updates driver. It functions, but it's about the worst computer performance I've seen (and I've put computers through rough paces). It takes several seconds to respond to any input and the animation for the start menu opening is slow enough to time with a stop watch. I dread trying to use the system under any sort of load. The xorg.conf file is pretty standard, and I don't know if I did anything beyond maybe adding a line to explicitly use the NVIDIA driver. I certainly didn't do anything before seeing such terrible performance.
It's not easy to do much in X Windows on the machine, so help that I can use from a console will be appreciated. I have quite a lot of Linux experience (dating back to 1997 and compiling kernels), but this has me stumped. I'm used to hardware just working when I configure the drivers. I've seen questions about a possible conflict with the broadcom wi-fi nic, but I do not have the drivers installed. The card rarely even shows up in a hardware search under Windows or Linux, and I've been using wired networking.
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