Hi, just wondering if its normal for program windows to move slowly when draging them around, ive got the latest nvidia driver installed and 3d acceleration or whatever its called. Everything else seems to be ok but just seems like the windows arent very smooth.

what are u talking about ! Linux or window?
or the windows in Linux?
if that's the case, try not customize your memory which will slow down your card alot

i knew someone was gonna ask that lol, was talking about the windows in linux. I havent changed anything in the memory or is there something i need to do?

Well one thing that would free up some memory is use a lighter window manager. I'm assuming you are using GNOME or KDE, which are both very good, but if your computer is slow, they kinda clunk along with those. I would use a smaller wm like icewm, fluxbox or blackbox, that'll give you the speed you need. I personally use iceWM, and my computer was fast on GNOME, it flies on iceWM.

nVidia (& ATI) drivers sometimes have problems.... test some different releases.

Moving windows around should be fine. There are known issues with *resizing* windows, but that's different.

Have any suggestions on which driver for a NVidia GeForce4 Ti 4200 ? Ive looked everywhere and cant seem to find which one i need, Right now i have this one installed: NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-4496-pkg2.run Thanks

One thing that'll greatly increase your window moving/resizing speed is to turn off "opaque window moving/resizing", or comparable options in whatever WM you choose. It'll show the window as an outline when you're moving/resizing, which is a lot faster to draw than the whole window with its contents, so unless you really need to see the window contents as they're being moved, I'd suggest trying it. And of course, like the others suggest, running a lighter window manager helps too. XFCE is nice, as are IceWM, Fluxbox, Blackbox, etc., but try a few and see which one you like.

Something else that may help is to decrease the color depth you're using. If you don't mind using 16-bit color instead of 24-bit, that may help with the speed a bit.

How much memory do you have? Processor? Some Linux zealots boast that Linux will run on just about anything which is true, but a lot less true if you want a big desktop environment like KDE.

Also would be interesting to know if MS Windows has been on this machine and how did it run. If Windows ran just fine but Linux sucks then there's probably a software problem of some kind. You could try an lighter desktop environment (I really like WindowMaker, though I wouldn't recommend it to anyone new to Linux, esp. with expectations that Linux be like win98), but then you'd just be living with the problem as opposed to actually solving it.

If it really is a vintage machine then a lighter desktop environment might be in order, otherwise KDE or Gnome should work fine. A lot of RAM helps, wouldn't want to run with less than 256MB.

Hi, I have 1gb of ram, 2ghz cpu. Windows is on the machine but it runs fine other then slow startup, Just tryed windowmaker and its to advanced for me at this point

Sweet, you've got a half gb more ram than I do, and I'm not feeling any pain.

Which distro are you running? I've found Mandrake to be excellent for setting up all the graphics stuff for my ati rage 128 card. In fact, that's pretty much why I'm sticking with it. If gentoo did as good a job I'd switch to it just because it's a neat idea and kind of fun. Tried it and didn't have the patience for configuring XFree to take full advantage of acceleration and all that, as well as other problems. I might give it another go, sort of work on it as a hobby as a second distro I can boot into, see if eventually I can't get something credible together with it.

Windowmaker is arguably *less* advanced than KDE. I started with Mandrake/KDE and it was great for poking around and learning in a very comfortable environment. Windowmaker is for when you know what you want and value small and fast over bigger, slower, but more feature rich and comprehensive. Odd as it sounds lean and clean, as far as the graphical environment goes, was one of the things I missed when I switched from win98 to Linux. I used user defined hot keys to launch apps so just cleaned off my desktop to the barest minimum. When I discovered WindowMaker could do the same thing, I switched instantly. It's really an efficient environment to work in IF you already know what you're doing and aren't freaked by the absence of a task bar. Probably not the best choice to start with, there's enough to learn without adding a totally foreign looking environment.

Hi, I have suse 9.0 profesional right now dont really wanna switch cause i payed $80 for it at best buy ive also tryed mandrake and it does do good with graphics but i dont really wanna just go to that and waste the $80

"Hi, I have suse 9.0 profesional right now dont really wanna switch cause i payed..."

lol, they got me the same way. I heard it was the most popular distro in Europe, so must be safe to buy it sight unseen and untried. I forget what it was exactly that caused me to ditch it, but it didn't take long. They certainly taught me a lesson I should have known already!

is it possible to put windows, suse and mandrake on my hd? and should i have any problems operating it i mean does it run like suse?

Yes, it's possible to have multiple operating systems on one hard disk. There's a lot of info out there on dual boot win/linux, the most common piece of advice being install windows first on the first partition (bootable) since it's the prima donna. Then Linux.

A second linux (3rd OS) could be trickier... Probably a topic for another thread, but yes, it's definitely doable. Perhaps the install routine of the second distro would be smart enough to configure the bootloader properly automatically. It's always nice when that happens