Oh well, another blog entry.

Are you running Vista under 512 MB of RAM? Or even 1GB of RAM, and a dual core processor? You might have been experiencing this problem: your PC will suddenly hang then after 10 seconds or so it will resume its tasks again.

The solution commonly is to terminate the application causing the problem, or looking up at the task manager and terminating up some unused and unimportant background applications in order to free up some RAM and clock cycles.

But running Linux under such amount of RAM? You might say not likely, considering the reputation of Linux operating systems and the large amount of RAM installed.

But I tell you, it IS possible, and IS happening.

It turns out that the bottleneck is the CPU itself. I currently have an Athlon 64 chip running at 3000GHz and two RAM sticks (a 2GB and a 512MB) running at 667MHz each.

Also, if you look at the system monitor (the counterpart of task manager in Linux), it says that only 8% is utilized.

Maybe also one constraint is the fact that I do not have an external video card.

Anyway, I am continuously upgrading my PC… And next stop: Video Card.

But then it seems ironic that this problem is somewhat rare in XP (I am dual booting for the sake of those pesky games), which uses more RAM. But maybe this is also due to the fact that Linux Mint is my main OS, and that I seldom boot to XP.

Oh well… the lesson? Don’t buy too much RAM… but focus on the CPU first.

By the way, I am running the 32 bit version of the operating system, because there is currently no 64 bit version of Linux Mint gnome edition. And also, I would not at the moment upgrade to a 64-bit OS, because Adobe’s Flash player has currently no 64 bit version for Linux (I don’t know about Windows; I don’t really care [about Windows]).

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