This is a part 3 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.

 I managed to find 256 MB of ram that seemed to work OK, and just for good measure I re-installed Linux Mint because the faulty ram might possibly have corrupted something. Now I can fill in a bit more of the table below. Boot time is from hitting the power button until the desktop start menu is displayed. It includes the time the BIOS is preparing to transfer control to the hard disk, and the 10 second delay for the boot menu.

	192 MB	256 MB	512 MB
Boot time	3mins 10 secs	2 min 49 secs	n/a
Firefox time	7.34 secs	7.19 secs	n/a

 It seems that the extra ram has made things a little faster, but that was not unexpected. Maybe if I could ger 512 MB of ram it might make things faster still. It does still feel a little sluggish, but it's not bad. One thing that slows things down has nothing to do with the actual PC, but is a peripheral to it. It is the mouse I am using. It is a Microsoft optical mouse that has very stiff buttons. Sometimes you think you have clicked, but nothing happens until you click again harder.

 There are still plenty of things I would like to do to this installation of Linux Mint 6, but I suspect it is just a little heavy for the old hardware I am trying to use. Before I connected the 40 GB hard disk for this experiment I had PCLinuxOS 2007 installed on the original hard disk. I am sure that booted a lot faster, and I am going to reconnect it to see just how fast it was.......

 It was much faster. The time from power on until the full desktop was up, including the delay from the boot manager, plus having to select my username and type in my password, was a rather faster 1 minute and 29 seconds. After all my hard work today I think I am going to scrap Linux Mint 6 and go for something a bit lighter.