gaim is way slow on this old laptop
 

I'm running the gaim that came with my mandrake 9.2 distro and on my old laptop, it's really slow. I was able to make other things faster by using fluxbox and dillo for web browsing, but gaim is too slow - it takes several seconds to even scroll down the buddy list.

Is there a way I can make it run faster? If i could turn off the anti-aliasing of the text, that might do the trick.

There is a console based AIM client called NAIM. Obviously since it is console it is not as nice as a gui but is has all the same functionality.