extreme slowness returns
 

AthlonXP 1700+
512mb PC2100 DDR RAM
5400RPM HDD (yeah i know it's slow)
Mandrake 8.2

when i click on something in KDE such as the home directory, open a console window or open mozilla it takes at LEAST 20 seconds before the application loads.
my computer case has a series of lights on indicated levels of power consumption which generaly points to how much the hard drive is being used. when i click on a program the light does not turn on at all meaning it is not using the hard drive that much... process manager says the CPU usage is 1.4% while trying to open a program....so then why the heck is everything so slow?
i am the only user logged in (you can login as different users with the ctrl+alt+F-key)
i am logged in as a non super user
there is over 400mb of ram free and all 2GB of the virtual memory is free

Open up a console and type the command top

This will show you a list of all the processes loaded on your machine.

BTW: What do you mean by the process manager show the CPU usage is at 1.4%.?

click the big K on the bottom left
go to applications
go to monitoring
click on process management

top says 1.5% processor use, biggest use comes from 'X' which uses 0.7% processing power.

ShawnD: Just out of curiousity, do you have a broadband connection? This is probably completely unrelated but awhile back during the school year, my computer would crawl to a halt when I tried doing anything on it...turned out when I brought it to my parents for the summer and used dial-up the problem went away. I move back to school in two weeks so we'll see if it's still a problem or not.

Just a posibility...not sure what would cause it though...I'm still a newbie.

yeah im on DSL

Hmmmm...as I've said, I'm such a newbie that I can't really begin to imagine what is causing this. However, I do know that the ethernet in my apartment would go off and on when I was in Windoze so I was thinking it could be a connection problem causing it.

Maybe you could disconnect the DSL for an hour or so and run a few programs and see if everything works fine. At least you'd know if it was the broadband then.

Keep me posted since I may have to go through this when I return to school :),
Jon

if i disconnect the DSL it takes about 5 minutes to boot the computer and it's brutaly slow, my DSL has not disconnected in the past month other than my manualy disconnecting it now.

The 5 minutes to boot is probably it trying to configure your ethernet and network stuff. I don't know why it would be slow once it boots though...mine times out doing that and then everything runs fine.