The biggest surprise (shock?) to me was the stark contrast between performance with only 256Mb of memory, and performance with 512Mb. I tease the Gnome crowd a lot for being chubby, but that’s not overweight, that’s clinical obesity.

So someone just asked in #kde4-devel whether it was worth trying KDE 4 on a 2500Mhz/256Mb computer and I was characteristically careful and guessed "It will work, but won't be good.". Then I decided to put my money where my mouth is and booted my Thinkpad X60 with "mem=256M maxcpus=1", logged into KDE 4 and set the power saving policy to "Powersave", which throttles the CPU to 1Ghz and locks it there. [...] And I was pleasantly surprised with how well it all works.

For most users, Firefox doesn't use an abnormally large amount of memory. For others, however, Firefox's memory consumption is a major problem (Especilaly for people using old computers with limited memory resources), in same cases memory usage in Firefox is due some to other sources, like number of plug-ins, themes and extensions.

Flash memory prices have tumbled in recent years, which has been good for MP3 players, cell phones, SSDs, and the now-ubiquitous USB thumb drive. Falling flash prices have also been good for motherboards, allowing Asus to cheaply equip some of its latest models with 512MB memory chips that house an ExpressGate instant-on operating system that's—you guessed it—based on Linux.

I don't quite know how it happened, but my parents finally got the Internet / computing bug. Last year, my Dad bought a Dell Studio and my Mom bought an HP Mini. Slowly, my two senior citizens have been getting the hang of things.

yekcim: "WarMUX is out, at long last, in its first version, 11.01!

It's a massive change for us (a lot of things under the hood have changed), and for you the end user (speed, bugs and devices to play it)!

Here is a more complete changelog:

* Name and numbering (year.month) change!
* Android port
* Symbian^3 port (number of characters/teams subject to memory constraint)

The gOS distribution is based on the Ubuntu 7.10 distribution. It uses the Enlightenment 17 window manager instead of the usual GNOME or KDE desktops, allowing for lower memory and speed requirements. Therefore gOS starts to work reasonably well on systems as low end as a 1GHz Pentium III with 256MB RAM.

The Linux memory management code does its best to ensure that memory will always be available when some part of the system needs it. That effort notwithstanding, it is still possible for a system to reach a point where no memory is available.

Today HP announced the HP Mini 1000, the successor to their HP MiniNote 2133 netbook. The new specs are similar to the old ones (512MB, 1GB, or 2GB memory, hard drive or SSD, which is new, fairly large keyboard, etc.), but the look is much improved.