Have you guys checked Chrome out? I just started using it and I've heard it's pretty powerful.

http://www.chromeexperiments.com

Mitch, it is a Hewlett-Packard laptop with an AMD Athlon X2 64 bit CPU, 2 gig RAM and a 180 gig HD. I bought it from Sam's because it was cheaper than other places when I needed a replacement for my PII Toshiba.

The laptop is fairly stable but the OS just crashes sometimes, no obvious reason. I just shrug and says, "Windows, what do I expect?" and reboot. My Linux machine has been running without a hiccup for three years now. All it does is run SETI though. And do network backups once in a while.

Brian

Brian,

And let me guess, you've flashed the BIOS on it multiple times and it still sucks? :) The laptop should run fine with Ubuntu...I am sure there is a wiki out there with the ACPI settings you need. If worse comes to worse OpenSUSE should work, especially for the weird wireless chipsets the vendors use.

Flash?.....BIOS?.....What are these strange terms?

What does ACPI stand for?

I'm a trucker, not a ComSci major!

You guys do know Firefox has massive memory leaks, right?

The only reason I still use FF over Opera for my main browser is the add-ons and themes.

BDS,

Firefox 3 fixed many of them. That was true for Firefox 2.x.

BrianR,

Unfortunately HP doesn't know how to ship anything right out of the box, so you need to go on their support site and download updates from them to make things work somewhat right :).

mbpark,

So why the hell is Firefox 3.07 currently using +300,000K RAM on my brand new Dell Studio 17 laptop with two tabs open?
That's more than some games use, btw.

mine is using 80,000k.

I think its because of the add ons and other shit you got running.

AdBlockPlus, AVG Safe Search, CoolIris, DownThemAll!, Fission, FoxTab, Greasemonkey, Hide Menubar, MultiRow Bookmarks Toolbar, Snap Links Plus, StumbleUpon, Tab Mix Plus, The Nethernet, Torbutton.

Admittedly, quite a few. But when I first boot firefox it's only at 80,000k.

then they start kickin in and WHAM!

Try removing a few systematically - maybe one of them has an issue.

i suspect nethernet

since i uninstalled that, ive been ok

With that many add-ons, I'm surprised the lights in your neighborhood aren't going dim.

BDS,

Because you don't take into consideration the memory usage of these add-on after they load and start caching tons of data :).

Apparently you have more than most people, but don't have the most important ones of all, FlashBlock and NoScript, which actually help reduce memory usage by cutting out the Flash and Javascript programs that you do not want to run.

There are Flash and Javascript programs I don't want to run?
Quite frankly, I'm not too fussed about Firefox's memory, my laptop can easily handle it.