I installed Mandrake 9.2 a few weeks ago and now have it configured for my taste. Its my first linux installed so I installed it using mostly default options.

Im now running blackbox window manager on my 1.2ghz pentium, 256mb ram machine with a 500mb swap. Its runs fine, but the overall feel is that its certainly slower than my windowsXP install. During the install of mandrake I choose both gnome and kde, has this got anything to do with it ?

A look at the processes with top gives (with just webbrowser open):

Cpu(s): 0,3% user, 0,7 % system, 0,0% nice, 99,0 % idle
Mem: 255764k total, 231704k used...
Swap 506008k total, 4648k used...

Ive looked through the processes and didnt find anything that I could see
was stealing a lot of memory.

Are programs like kdeinit, keventd, kswapd etc neccesary when I run blackbox ?

How can I get it as fast as XP ? Arent linux supposed too use the resources better ?

when you say slow, do you mean graphics like the X server (GUI)? Or do you mean apps starting and executing? or something else

Apps execute very slow. Mozilla for example takes ages. Its faster to boot my XP installation than the Mandrake one too.

If you have search this forum. You will get a lot of information about this but I'll summarize it for you.

Windows XP loads bits of program's data into memory. Programs like Internet Explorer and Office are about a quarter loaded when you boot into Windows. When you run these programs, they instantly startup. In LINUX programs do not load tidbit of themselves in memory, so what you are seeing is the bottleneck of the hard drive. You can buy a solid state hard drive and you will see a very, very huge performance gain. Programs will load up very, very fast with that kind of drive. You can have programs loaded upon boot but that will eat up a lot of memory and reduce the processing of the system. We LINUX users learn to cope with the technology that we have or learn how to optimize the technology. LINUX doesn't care where on the hard drive the data lives, so we can use this to our advantage. You can place directories like /usr in front of the hard drive and this will improve speed. Also LINUX can place its directories on other hard drives too so the system can work in parrallel. Another way is to optimize the kernel options in sysctl but that file takes some explaining and sometimes dangerous to change a few settings.

KDE and GNOME are Desktop Manangers. They were designed for Windows users that wanted to try out LINUX with out any fuss that Window Managers such as Blackbox have. Memory in LINUX consumes differently. It caches a lot more than Windows. If you have your computer up several hours, days, weeks, months, or years LINUX has cached enough to load up programs much faster than it did when it first booted.