I just did a clean install of Suse 9.1 on my laptop. I was previously running 9.0. The new version only runs at about a tenth of the speed that 9.0 did. The reason I was upgrading was to get better hardware detection. It did do a better job of detecting things but unfortunately it is too slow to use. I tried installing Mandrake to see if the problem might have just been the 2.6 kernel, but Mandrake ran quickly. I thought the problem might be my ATI 9600 video card slowing X down, but I followed the Suse instructions in their supplementary packages and the new drivers didn't help.

Another thing that might be somehow related is ACPI. My fanspeed behaviour is strange. In 9.0 the fan only kicked on when the system was under strain and was feeling quite warm. Now it kicks on twice as much, and sometimes it runs continuously from startup to shutdown. I have tried playing with the power settings but nothing seems to make a difference.

Suse is my preferred distro, an ideal solution would be one where someone tells me what differences are causing the slowdown and how to speed up Suse. I will only switch to another distro as a last resort. Actually, I will probably revert back to 9.0 if I can't solve the problem with 9.1.

The problem is NOT that my system is slow in general. I have an AMD 3400 and 512 MB of 400 Mhz ram. Other OS run fast, including Suse 9.0.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Are you firing up a bunch of unnecessary processes under 9.1 that you weren't under 9.0? I just installed 9.1 myself and it runs very fast.

Try running the top command, which shows the processes that are using the most CPU in descending order. Open a terminal session and just enter: top
You may discover that you're using 80% of your CPU to run something that you don't want or need.

If you see runaway processes eating up tons of cycles, then you can get rid of them with the kill command. Make a note of the process ID (aka the PID) then enter: kill xxxx (where xxxx is the PID) I don't know if that will solve the problem but that's the first place I'd look. -- J.W.

Well, when I was in KDE I hit Ctrl Esc and that brought up the process manager. There didn't seem to be that much stuff and the highest processor usage was 1.5% and that was X.

9.1 feels a lot faster than 9.0 due to the 2.6 kernel and kde 3.2.2. Even if you were starting a bunch of unused services, it should be fast on your computer. I would start by making sure dma is on (hdparm). Check out this site, there is info on a lot of different brands...

http://www.linux-laptop.net/

I would think that it should be faster for exactly those reasons. Unfortunately, it is slow. I have a 60GB 7200 rpm hard drive and UltraDMA100 is on.

Here is a little more info. I have tried the x86_64 version and also the 32 bit version and they are both slow. The mouse won't even move smoothly across the screen. Installation always goes fast. It also works fast in command line only. I just thought to try something new. I ran WindowMaker and it is also slow. I'm a noob so I don't know but is it some problem with X?