My PC is 1800 Mhz 40 GB hard drive split between Suse 9.1 and Win XP. 256 MB Ram. Suse 8.2 and 9.0 were fast but Suse 9.1 is so slow.
I upgraded from DVD and did a normal install. Any ideas.

Change to gentoo =), that's what I did. I am somehow joking, I used to have SuSE 9.0 and then upgraded to 9.1, but as you said it got slower and many things that worked under 9.0 did not worked on 9.1 anymore, so I switched to gentoo.

Thanks I might downgrade to 9.0 or try a fresh install.

I tried a fresh install of 9.1 and that's how I got it slower than ever, maybe it works for you good luck

Complaining only that a system is "slow" is pretty vague, so it's hard to offer any meaningful suggestions without more information. However, are you sure you aren't running a lot of unnecessary services in the background that are eating up CPU cycles? Are there specific actions or tasks that you are trying to perform which take longer to complete? My point is that it's possible that any slowness you're seeing is a temporary condition which can be rectified with proper tweaking. If you can provide more details about exactly what is going on, it may be possible to fix this. Example: what are the results of top? Do you have any runaway processes? -- J.W.

J.W thanks for the help I will post the results of top next week.
Although looking at them in the past even when CPU was only 2% opening Konqueror or even a shell which was much slower than with 9.0 or 8.2.
For example with 9.0 or 8.2 opening a shell was instaneous but now it actually has the penguin type timer.

How can I see what services are running ?

I'm having the same problems with Suse 9.1. There's no problem with CPU usage on mine, Suse just seems to suck an incredible amount of memory for system processes. I have 396mb of ram, but by the time Suse boots up and KDE starts, I'm left with a measly 20mb or so (glad there's tons of swap). I've already stopped a bunch of boot processes, anything that isn't critical, but there's still close to 80 processes running at a fresh boot and I'm sure they aren't all necessary...

Even so, I can still compile, surf the web, listen to music, and burn a CD at the same time without a lick of trouble. The only big problem I have with Suse is when I have about 10 network connections running at once, things get really muddy. For some reason, I can kick the crap out of Mandrake or Slackware with tons of open connections, and have no problem at all. *shrugs*......I swear, the penguin icon on this website alone probably takes up 40 megs....bastards.

Found in the Suse sysconfig editor:

File: /etc/powertweak/tweaks
Description:
_Overcommit_Memory

_The_following_algorithm_is_used_to_decide_if_there's_enough_memory:_if_this_option_is_checked,_then _there's_always enough_memory._This_is_a_useful_feature,_since_programs_often_malloc()_huge_amounts_of_memory_'just_ in_case',
while_they_only_use_a_small_part_of_it._Leaving_this_option_unchecked_will_lead_to_the_failure_of_su ch_a_huge_malloc(),
when_in_fact_the_system_has_enough_memory_for_the_program_to_run.__On_the_other_hand,_enabling_this_ feature_can
cause_you_to_run_out_of_memory_and_thrash_the_system_to_death,_so_large_and/or_important_servers_will_want_to_set
this_disabled.

Would it be wise to change the value of this option if only using Suse as a desktop environment? I don't like seeing the words "death" and "system" in the same sentace. =(

I have found a solution install Mephis it is a lot faster and installing software,
well it is very easy.