I have been unsuccessfully searching for any kind of tools or Tips on system maintenance for my Novell Linux Desktop 9 SP3 system.

Still more at home in the Windowz world when I could just run registry scans, defrag, disk scan to help boost system performance after a lengthy run time. Even going into doing manual edits of the system registry I am familiar with and the file system I am familiar with to clean things up to keep the system running at peak performance.

Now after running NLD on my laptop for the past 9 months, I have noticed the system performance degrading and things getting slower and slower as time goes on. The only thing I have been able to find out so far in system maintenance is how to scan for security holes and that there are no such thing as defrag tools (and undelete to my unfortunate surprise) for the raiser file system.

Does anyone know of some decent tools for system maintenance and/or some good sites that have tips that would relate to the NLD9 / Suse9 distro?

AFAIK, the Reiser file system does not defragment (unlike Windows NTFS and FAT file systems). I could be wrong though - that's why I'm attaching to this thread.
Do you think that's rather a) CPU usage, b) RAM usage, c) harddisk access speed, or d) graphics performance?

Thanks, - I'm just listening.

No, in my research I found that Reiser does not need to be defragmented, just somthing I looked for coming from the windows world and acustomed to performing such tasks on a windows system.

CPU is a P4 266 with 2gig RAM (Toshiba Satellite P10-S429). The graphics are Nvidia, but I do not use the Nvidia driver. I have been using the generic driver that distributes with Suse. There have been quite a few kernel updates that have come down through the channel that after doing the Nvidia driver install for the third time (each update switches it back to the generic), I said to hell with it since I do not run anything requiring the 3D graphics acceleration (laptop is used just for work). I do see the CPU get pegged at 100% in system monitor when the system is just simply copying a file from a USB drive to the local IDE drive, even mouse movement slows to a crawl with large file copies. The slow down does feel more like hard disk access speed. the system used to boot a lot faster than it does now (takes close to 8min when it used to be around 4 to get to the desktop).