System requirements for Gnucash

[Donald Allen]

On Thu, Oct 2, 2008 at 2:18 PM, Eric <bigbsdfan at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I am trying to decide whether to dump $500 on a new laptop or spend $150 to refurbish a pretty decent Latitude CPx.  The Latitude has a 650mhz cpu, and if I refurbish it the RAM would be 512 mb.  One of the key programs that I plan on using on the laptop is Gnucash with Debian Linux, regardless of which laptop I get.
>
> I've run Gnucash on desktop systems with the same amount of RAM (512 mb) but with faster CPU's and it ran well.  I also tried running it on an older Vaio with 112 mb RAM and a 600mhz cpu, and it crawled.  I am thinking it was the ram, and not the cpu speed, that was the limiting factor on the Vaio, but am not sure.
>
> I am wondering if there are recommended system requirements for Gnucash in terms of RAM and CPU speed, and if so, what those are.

I can't answer that question directly, but can tell you of my
experiences. I've run gnucash on a bunch of different laptops. The
slowest, (which I still have though I don't use it much), is a
Thinkpad 600x with a 650 Mhz PIII processor, 512 Kb of memory, and a
5400 rpm disk running Ubuntu 8.04. I would describe it as barely
usable on that machine; I wouldn't want to have to use it all the time
on that hardware. The startup time is bothersome, and things about
gnucash that are slow (e.g., some reports, qif import) are pretty
unbearable. For the most part, I run gnucash on a Thinkpad X61 with
dual 2.1 Ghz Core 2 Duo processors, 2 Gb memory, and a 7200 rpm disk.
It runs great on that machine, though qif imports and some reports are
still slower than I think they ought to be. The whole thing is
noticeably slower, though still very usable, on my Thinkpad G41 with a
3.06 Ghz Xeon processor, 2 Gb of memory and a 7200 rpm disk.

My recommendation? I think you would be throwing good money after bad
if you were to invest in "refurbishing" the 650 Mhz Latitude. I'm not
sure what you can buy "new" for $500, as you suggest in your post, but
there's a lot of amazing hardware out there today for very reasonable
prices. I'd go for something contemporary and give the Latitude to a
school or a child you know.

/Don

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