248MB (32MB for on board graphics)
I have 256MB RAM on my system (supposadly), and an on-board 32MB graphics card. Does the graphics card use memory from the 256MB? That would partly-explain why 'free -m' tells me I have
219MB RAM.
I also disagree, I run Windows XP on an 1800MHz 248MB (32MB for on board graphics) machine and it's not too bad. Right now I'm running Opera with a couple of tabs open and it's using 104MB of RAM up, and just 80MB with nothing running. Wow XP is using up just 32.25% of my physical memory!
Try removing 128MB RAM and see how it copes with a
deficieny of RAM
. A wise-man once said "It's all about memory management", or something like that.
Here, I'm running GNOME 2.12, with two KDE apps: Konqueror (which isn't even that bad) (four tabs ATM) (I fucked up Firefox recompiling it. Recompiling it ATM with different (i.e. working) configure options) and amaroK, GAIM, irssi (in an xterm), and a GNOME terminal (I don't use/need alot of GNOME terminal's functionality, not even tabs alot of the time, but I still use it. And I still don't have problems with slowness/anything.) open, and I'm using 215 out of 219MB RAM, and 22MB swap. Even when I'm compiling stuff (RAM and CPU anyhow goes into basically 100% usage/fullness) and running much the same applications as now, I can browse away and nearly forget that the system's compiling-away.
BTW, I've used Windows XP on this machine (so same amount of RAM), and it
sucked alot (not all. Most likely not when I'm only browsing the web (in IE).) of the time. I had put it down to my "mingy" 256MB RAM. Maybe Windows XP only sucks on a small amount of RAM when you actually use some RAM?
EDIT: Whoa, I just started the GIMP, Glade, inkscape, KWord (BTW, my dislikeness for KDE is over, ever since I installed it again.), nautilus, and Emacs. And not a hitch on editing this! Here's the output of 'free -m' (I know it surprised me):
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 219 216 3 0 4 75
-/+ buffers/cache: 136 83
Swap: 1913 45 1868
I can still mess about in each of these apps without any hitches.
I dunno how they do it.