I've got 10 month old compaq notebook, but it really crawls a lot of the time, my PII desktop is much faster!

I have a feeling there may be something delaying the start up of applications. Mozilla takes forever to open (30secs - 1 minute) even kate (KDE text editor) can take ages. I've tried logging out (of KDE) and logging back in windowmaker, this can take several minutes!! Also when I switch a console (alt-F1 etc.) I after I type the password, there's a good 20 second wait before the prompt appears.

So my question is how can I troubleshoot what's causing these 486 like performance?


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Spec:
Athalon XP 1.7Ghz
256 DDR
SuSE 9.0

Checklist:
* I've gone through the runlevels and turned off stuff like mysql, apache, cpufreq, apcid - anything I thought unessential.

* I've checked hdparm:
dev/hda:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 728 MB in 2.01 seconds = 362.37 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 72 MB in 3.02 seconds = 23.86 MB/sec

* I've looked at top - not all RAM is used up, no swap being used, load average typically less than 0.2.

* No icecream in the CD tray
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Try again top, but press the big T, so it list the cpu-time instead the cpu-load.

Is it with no-grafics (runlevel 3) slow too?
If no, check if your hostname is set correctly.

Check your RAM with "Memcheck", should be on your Installation-CD like Boot from HDD, Install, Repair, Memcheck.

Thanks for those tips....

I just checked my /etc/hosts
my hostname (linux) was not in there, just 127.0.0.1 localhost
I added my ip and hostname:
192.168.0.3 linux.local linux
and that seems to have helped a lot of operations, no delay when opening a new console, no long delay when starting kssh and many other apps

However there still seems to be some sort of network delay, whenever I try to open a new site in mozilla or lynx, it takes forever to resolve the host (10 secs or more) and I'm on a 512 DSL line. Once resolved it's normal 512 like speeds.

I'm going through a netgear router wirelessly, my flatmate has a windows 2000 box wired to the router and he has no problems, makes my flashy laptop look like a 486!.

I've also tried it wired by ethernet, and I seem to recall it still being slow to resolve.

Now to complicate things further, at my office, I've got a linux box as a router, and last time I took my laptop there, I seem to recall that I had no such resolving delays.

Incedentaly, I've manually set the nameservers in resolv.conf:
/etc/resolv.conf
==================================
search local
nameserver 192.168.0.1
nameserver 193.200.201.111
==================================

Wierd.

I'm going to try a wired connection to the router again, memcheck etc. in the meantime has anyone any more troubleshooting ideas, particularly to do with this resolving malarky?