Hi neil I'm sure its only 218mb cause, i see a warning that says not enough RAM when i start the machine :) Thanks for your concern, but the comps at college are quite fine for what i do (some network and text processing stuff) and like you suggested i'm planning to get a laptop soon. Although Dscheme would be better for a beginnner like me, I'm using mzscheme with Quack mode (which's really nice btw) because i've always wanted to learn to use emacs and figured this was a good oportunity to do so. also, my name isn't Charlie, I created this email id around a year ago to check how good Gmail was :) ( I was using hotmail back then) and this account just stayed like that. <div> On 11/13/09, Neil Van Dyke <<a href="mailto:neil@neilvandyke.org" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">neil@neilvandyke.org</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> I'm guessing that you'd benefit from running DrScheme rather than just the "mzscheme" command-line tool. Are you sure that the machine at school has 218MB total? A more typical number near there would be 256MB total, or maybe 248MB total plus 8MB video RAM. In any case, you should be able to run DrScheme in 200-some total MB reasonably if you strip down the rest of your desktop software. If you don't have lots more RAM than you need, you want to be running just a plain X window manager, like Fvwm, not the ridiculously bloated Gnome. With 200-some MB, if you start up Firefox to read documentation online while running DrScheme, things will get a lot slower, as the computer's virtual memory system temporarily swaps pieces of DrScheme and Firefox onto disk. The solution Also, see whether you can beg or borrow an old laptop you can use for your work, and whether the computers at school will accommodate more memory. (A 512MB stick of PC133 is about $10.) Being able to run both DrScheme and a semi-modern Web browser at the same time will help you work/learn faster. -- <a href="http://www.neilvandyke.org/" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">http://www.neilvandyke.org/</a> </blockquote></div>