ive used fedora on and off now for maybe 2 or 3 years, i have a 2.5ghz celeron 325D processor a gig of ram and a 60 gig hd. more then enough resources to run almost any distro.

recently i bought a new computer , so i decided to make the computer listed above completely linux. i installed fedora 6. once the install was done i logged in. the boot up and login must have taken 4 or 5 mins not to mention that once i did get logged in everything is slow. menus etc run fine , but it takes me about a 1 min to load xterm and maybe 3 to load firefox. ive ran fedora on this computer plenty of times before and this never happened. i installed fedora 3 , that last distrto i ran on that comp. same thing . whats my prob here. ive done ran memtest86 over and over it passes all testing. ive even switched hard drives still the same thing, ive made no hardware mods to this comp what could me problem be, this is frustrating because it seems like almost every distro i try i have problems with.

Although it's not entirely accurate, I'd run "top" and see what's eating up the resources. Could be X. Look for CPU usage and the load average.

The first boot might take some time as settings are created, altered etc..some databases (like slocate database, but not necessarily that) are automatically formed, and in addition Fedora Core 6 likes to run some prelink system every once in a while that eats up resources while it's running (it won't run for long, but anyway). I suggest you try using it for a few days and see if things settle down after your first boot, or if it keeps on being slow, then start inspecting what vmstat, top, etc. tell you about what's going on in your machine. You could do it right now, but if it's your first boot, you might be running some things that are not run anymore next time you boot; Fedora does things this way, and I'm too annoyed about some of it's processes that I have to disable manually to get it run faster. It's not the most lightweight distribution out there.

If you still suspect it's a hardware issue, try some very light distribution and if it runs slowly too, you might be right. Read some docs easily found on the web about tuning your system and see if it helps..

EDIT: your video driver is one thing to check out; after I installed Kubuntu on a laptop it run awfully slow because the setup didn't detect the appropriate driver, it just used a generic vesa driver, and once I switched that to an appropriate sis driver (sis chipset) things got a little more speedy..it could be something like that as well.

But anyway, read your logfiles under /var/log -- dmesg, syslog, Xorg.0.log, ...