I'd like to think I have a decent system. (2.33GHz Core2Duo, 4 Gigs DDR667, 7200RPM SATA drive, nVid Quadro FX2500) I show it to people sometimes when they gripe about the brand new computer they bought that doesn't work because it came preinfected with Vista. For the most part, my system ROCKS! But sometimes, it can just be slow on some things. It takes about two minutes to do a full restart. I've set grub's delay to 1 second, and configured the bios for "fast boot" and skip memory check. Still, I'd like to make it faster. I can run a lean windows 2000 box, and have at work for a long time. On it, I could reboot in less than a minute, and its hardware wasn't half what I have now. I am less skilled with Linux than I am with Windows, but I'd like to change that.
I've looked around the web for ways to optimize your Linux system. hdparm was mentioned a lot, but my drive is sata, and my cdrom is set to be recognised as scsi because as IDE, its throughput was too jerky to watch DVDs. When I tried to turn on DMA, hdparm kept throwing a fit about "HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device". sdparm doesn't seem to offer the same. For example, I wand to use 32-bit transfer mode with sync, hdparm won't cooperate, and sdparm doesn't know what I'm talking about.
My system is fast enough for me. I'm OK with waiting 6 seconds for FireFox to load the first time, 9 for OpenOffice.org Writer, and 2 each subsequent time, but skeptical windows users cling to any excuse to hate it.
So far, I've trimmed down what services start at boot, I even have VMWare set not to start automatically, which should shave off a few seconds (No VMs are configured to start on their own, only the service was.) I wish the stuff that starts up on boot could start up asynchronously, or as asynchronously as possible. I'm not holding my breath on that though. Also, my display flickers every now and then. It doesn't appear to affect the applications or the system. It happens with and without beryl and vmware running. I'm using nvidia's latest driver as well. Any ideas?