Thanks agmg and Old-Polack,
and which is your advice for a laptop with a temp about 60ºC, to stay using the 3.2 or 2.6.38 kernels or install the 3.4.11?
There's an old saying... if it ain't broke... don't fix it.
If you are not experiencing any problems with the kernel you are presently using with your hardware, what do you hope to gain by installing a different kernel? Newer kernels usually support newer hardware, as well as the older hardware. If you are actually experiencing problems with the present kernel, then a newer one may well correct that problem, but could also possibly create a different problem. You won't know until you try. If you install a newer kernel, and don't remove the older kernel, you can still boot to either, and compare each to the other. I've regularly had systems with 8-10 different kernels installed. My present system has 9 installed kernels;
[root@fatman ~]# ls -l /boot |grep vmlrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 21 Dec 30 16:21
vmlinuz -> vmlinuz-3.6.11-solcp1-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2291936 Jul 17 2011 vmlinuz-2.6.38.8-pclos3
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2245440 Apr 17 2012 vmlinuz-3.2.15-pclos1
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2238560 Apr 17 2012 vmlinuz-3.2.15-pclos1.bfs
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2240480 Apr 23 2012 vmlinuz-3.2.16-pclos1
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2236528 Apr 23 2012 vmlinuz-3.2.16-pclos1.bfs
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2243392 May 12 2012 vmlinuz-3.2.17-pclos1.bfs
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2235136 May 22 2012 vmlinuz-3.2.18-pclos1.bfs
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2208688 Feb 21 2012 vmlinuz-3.2.7-etjr2
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2684784 Dec 22 10:47 vmlinuz-3.6.11-solcp1
My current default kernel is the 3.6.11, as shown by the vmlinuz link, highlighted in
blue. For the most part the 3.x.x kernels work better with my hardware than the 2.6.38 kernel did, but it's hard telling the difference between the various 3.x.x kernels. They all seem to work equally well. For that matter, the 2.6.38 kernel was perfectly acceptable, before the 3.x.x kernels arrived. None of the kernels posed any specific problems, it's just that the 3.x.x seem to boot and run a bit faster.
For reference, the current hardware is;
Gigabyte GA-970A-UD3 Motherboard
AMD FX 4100 Zambezi 4-core CPU
nVidia GeForce 9800 GT Graphics card
16 GB G.SKILL DDR3 1600 RAM
Antec BP550 PSU
4 Seagate Hard Drives - Total capacity 5.75 TB