This is a part 2 of an experiment to install Linux Mint 6 (Felicia) onto an old PC. The PC is branded as a Time machine, and has an Intel 810 chipset on the Gigabyte made motherboard (Full specs here). It is fitted with an Intel 700Mhz Pentium III (coppermine) processor and has only 192 MB of ram fitted. Both the graphics and sound are from the onboard Intel chips. I have fitted an RTL8139 based PCI ethernet adaptor, and there is some sort of old analogue TV adapter fitted. Finally, it has an old Philips DVD burner fitted that no longer seems to burn disks, but still reads them. For the purposes of this experiment I have fitted a 40GB Seagate hard drive that originally had Windows 95 installed on it.

 Installing all the software upgrades took an age. Downloading all the files did take around the predicted 12 minutes, but the installation of those files took well over an hour, maybe nearly two, but I was not paying that much attention to the time. Although I am keen to start customising the software and look of the desktop, I am going to hold off on doing that so I can do some other experiments first.

 The first experiment (maybe the only real experiment) is to measure the boot up time from power on to full desktop. I think it is going to be a bit on the slow side for one reason - low memory. One thing I didn't think of is that the 192 MB of installed RAM is shared with the graphics adapter. I am not sure how much it is using, but I did look at how much memory I had to spare while the updating was going on. It is almost fully utilised with just 3 or 4 MB spare. I have a few sticks of memory that I believe are OK and I will upgrade it first to 256 MB, and then to 512 MB, and see how it effects the boot time. I'll also see if I can measure the time to clicking on the Firefox icon and getting the Google home page displayed.

	192 MB	256 MB	512 MB
Boot time	3mins 10 sec	oops	arghh !
Firefox time	7.34 secs	blast	dmmit

 The rest of this experiment will have to be abandoned for now. It seems a fair few sticks of my old PC100 and PC133 memory are faulty ! (It is also possible that the motherboard could be making things worse). I will have to see if I can afford to but some new memory, but old memory is a lot more expensive than contemporary memory. I am using Memtest86 to test the memory. It is installed as an option from the boot menu by many linux distros, including Mint Linux 6, but is also available to freely download as a live CD from here (click on the free download option).

 So far Memtest86 is showing that I have at least one good 128 MB stick of ram. Two other 128 MB sticks seem to just lock the test up totally, and my only spare 256 MB stick shows a host of errors. I do have a pile of 64 and 32 MB sticks, but they are a bit small for what I want, and the motherborad only has two memory slots. One perfect 64 MB and one perfect 128 MB sticks would at least give me a reliable 192 MB. It's where I started from, but at least it would give a stable platform for other tests.

 If there is a part three to this saga it will be when I have secured at least 256 MB of good ram, if not you'll have to believe me that everything is working OK.