tjenare totte!
Well, you've to do a lot of things to speed up. Your computer is quite fast for Linux, but the memories are relatively low. Here are some tips to speed tips up:
1 - A faster distribution would make wonders as
Slackware or an easier to use, but still great,
Libranet, which is Debian based. There's nothing wrong with Mandrake either, as long as you disable all useless process running on the background
. This can easily be disabled on Mandrake Control Center.
2 - A faster desktop or window manager would be neat. KDE and Gnome does a nice job with their "user-friendly" goal, but they are getting heavier and heavier. WinXP is way faster then those two ones for crying out loud
. I'd say, go with
XFCE or
Fluxbox
3 - Use lighter Browsers, as
Mozilla Firefox instead of Mozilla or Netscape. It's extremely fast and nice. In fact, you'd use that one all the time, regardless the Operating System you are running.
4 - If you need an e-mail client, skip Evolution. It's too heavy too. A good alternative is
Mozilla Thunderbird. It's just as neat as Outlook Express but without all those security holes and spreading of viruses
.
5 - Office: If you need Office, you've to use
Open Office or it's non free brother Star Office. Unfortunatelly, OpenOffice takes a lot of time to open even in a 2GHZ processor
. Now, if all you need is a Word Processor I'd say go with
Abiword and if you need a spreadsheet, I'd say go with
GNumeric. They both are really great and really fast.
Following the steps above, I could get my compaq armada with a 166 MHZ processor and 32 of RAM to run really neat, so just think how nice this is going to run on your machine
.
A final note though, Abiword, Fluxbox, Gnumeric, XFCE and many others are shipped with most of the distributions around, so try installing from your Mandrake CD's first
Regards!