Well I just made a new install of Fedora 5 on to my computer. The install went fine and the system started up then I did something stupid. I switched my monitor to the closet listing in the standard list and as a result the refresh rate is now out of range. Now that this has happened I rembered a similar problem a few years ago. I remember from that last time this happened that I had to change the refresh rate in a config file but I don't remember the file or what editor I used in the command line to do it. I tried to start emacs and it did not seem to work. I feel kind of stupid asking this but it can be surprising what you can forget when you get away from Linux for a while.

I noticed when I had the system up and running that Fedora 5 seemed slower then previous versions. This is odd since the machine that I now have is double the speed of my old Linux machine and running the system with similar package installation.

Also I read the sticky about installing third party graphics drivers. The sticky suggested against it and using the included drivers. Well in my past experience I ran some third party drivers on my system and noticed a great improvement in performance. Based on what I have read the main reason not to install the third party drivers is to prevent confusion as the result of a change in hardware. If I am not planning to change graphics cards would it make sense to go to the third party drivers?

Sorry for the long post and any help would be appreciated.

Refresh rate:
Unless you have a very exotic monitor, you should be able to google this.
Just look for your manufacturer's site.

Performance:
FC5 actually runs faster for me than FC4.
See what processes you're running and disable what you don't need.
As for package management:
Yum is horribly slow, both APT4RPM and SMART are faster (and IMHO also better in handling dependencies)

Video drivers:
This is mostly needed for 3D acceleration.
If you're using nVidia or ATI you can safely install them using RPMs:
http://stanton-finley.net/fedora_cor...es.html#nVidia