Somewhat recently I made the move from WinXP to Fedora Core 5. The fact my OS was slow as a Ford Pinto encouraged me. My Fedora feels even slower though! Graphically...

I'm using KDE, with GAim, Firefox, and a few folders open... thats it! But all graphical applications run far from smoothly, menus take some time to "paint" etc. Switching between firefox tabs is aggrivatingly slow. Now at first, I thought, hm maybe I'm expecting too much. But when I got my new Ipod and went back into my WindowsXP partition to use iTunes (wasnt ready to deal with Ipod+Linux) I found an OS I remember being horrible to slow to seem almost quick. I have a P4 1.8ghz, with 512 PC133, and a ATi 9600XT grahpics card (faster than a 9800). Anyone have an ideas?

Also, my fonts seem almost like a poor quality bitmap image. (I'll include a screen shot).. ok took me a minute to notice i "may not post attachments". So much for the screenshot.

And just to throw this one out there, my network card seems to perform slow, though currently I've attributed this to the overall slow performance of the computer.

To accelerate video try installing ATI accelerated drivers.
To reduce overall load and startup, try disabling unnecessary services.
Also go to the KDE control panel and try reducing some of the animations or effects included (if you haven't already).

That should make some difference. In truth though (my opinion), I do think that your computer is a bit aged for FC5 (which has some of the absolute latest software included).