The next step would be moving all the media from our laptop to the NAS, and removing all the unnecessary internet access stuff installed by Netgear. Hopefully it will be next weekend : )))

KDE is my default GUI. That alone makes 300 megs disappear. But 2 G is workable. Yes my current system has 8G but I do have a 1 G tablet that also runs KDE and other stuff on arm. So 1 G is big enough to run the heavies WM at the movement and LibreOffice.

Tar
“OK for simple web surfing.”
Webbrowser is where the problem comes in. As long as you don’t use firefox or have KSM turned on. Chrome until the firefox 15 comes out would be my recommendation to anyone with under 4G of ram so they do not get burnt because of there anti-virus and other plugins.

http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Firefox-15-reduces-memory-consumption-1649125.html

This is quite a major fix so closing tabs does infant give your memory back.

With KSM on it does not matter as much because running the same test with 150+ tabs as http://www.h-online.com did yes firefox running in wine on Linux so I could install the windows only site advister. At peak only consumed 300 megs compared to 1.4 to 1.7GB with KSM on. With KSM off it performed about the same as the graphic at h-online. Most of the leaks compress very well because they are duplicate data. With compression on being KSM if wine would run on my 1G of ram arm table it would work.

So if you cannot make a machine with 2G of ram productive something is wrong. Windows I can understand MS is not willing to pay VMWARE a patent license to use KSM tech so leaking applications eat more memory than they should. Yes MS wants everyone to pay them for using there patented tech yet does not go out and pay for the patents that would make user experience better.

Its in fact web surfing that kicks the systems nuts in mostly because Firefox and Internet explorer has some quite major memory leaks. New version of firefox address some of these.

And that is why they are not in stores? A rather feeble attempt at levity, Mr. Pogson!

They sold out just about everywhere …

Is that why they quit making them? Too much hassle to keep restocking the stores?

Face the facts, Mr. Pogson. No one wanted them once a Windows version was available and they fell by the wayside. As to “sold out”, you yourself linked to a a place (Alibaba?) that was offering them at fire sale pricing a while back.

True enough as I can attest with a ASUS eee loaded with WinXP as sold.

A whole ‘nother matter when wiped over with UNR 10.04 (GNU/Linux); then I’ve found its a quite capable little workhorse, can run LibreOffice, Matlab, Octave, Mathematica, Maxima and other heavy stuff….

Nonsense. I have three Atoms running GNU/Linux in my home usually for visitors. They all think they are pretty snappy. Think of it. A few years ago 32bit single-core could run all the software for 30 users in my computer lab at 1.8gHz clock. These Atoms have two and four 64-bit cores at 1.6 gHz and the systems in my home are for single users although I can run stuff on them by SSH and X remotely. They have 1gB and 1.5gB RAM and no one runs out.