I have just installed RH9 on my AMD Duron 700 Mhz, 128 Mb, separate HDD, full installation as server (all packets), I need this to evaluate server features.
As a newbie I would have dozens of questions but I will start from here :
The system is generally very slow, much slower then the WinME I have on the other HDD.
Application and utilities thakes quite long time to start, switch windows, run functions or terminate. For example Ximian starts in 15-20 seconds, Open office about the same, Shell bash 4-5 second, KPPP 10-12 seconds.
Is that normal? How can I get the system run faster (changing PC apart)?
Thanks in advance.

No, can't say this is normal. What window manager are you running, KDE or GNOME??

Try typing 'top' in your terminal and check if any process is eating your CPU!!

I'm using Gnome. 'top' reports more than 60 processes but only 3 running. Almost all the memory is used.

If you can, get more ram. Use a liter window manager.

stop som,e useless things first
there is probably a dozen of daemon running you don't want
take a look in service.