> how much RAM does that 900MHz laptop have?
> Also, can you post bootchart resulst from a low-RAM session, i.e. boot the kernel with mem=128M ?

It has 256M, but that's pretty irrelevant here, because bare KDE here fits into about 22M (and together with the rest of the system to less than 64M). So the bootcharts would be exactly the same.

> This is relevant because some low-end under $200 systems are sold in US stores preloaded with Linux, but with only 128MB of RAM (and worse, they probably use 32MB of that for the video memory, so if your laptop has dedicated video ram, you'd need to boot with mem=96M to match).

That quite frankly sounds like a stupid bussiness model to me, what's the default GUI there, Windowmaker? I'm surprised somebody would still buy something with so little memory these days.

> See http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=139 for the kind of benchmark results we need to fight against...

Well, let's say everything up to X included takes 20M, KDE another 30M, OOO 50M ... and it's full (and the real numbers may be actually even worse). No wonder it must be bloody slow. Possible simple solutions include at least doubling the memory for little money, using KOffice in KDE instead of OOo or simply not running OOo from KDE. A little tweaked system with KDE+KOffice should do just with in 128M, but running just OOo in KDE means pulling in whole KDE and OOo.

I actually want to do some memory benchmarks soon to have some usable numbers on this, because I'm not aware of anybody ever having done that (that is, at least somewhat correctly, everybody can just have a look at top and say some non-sensical numbers).