I have a spare machine that I use to experiment with Linux. Im really still pretty new and dont have a good idea what Im doing, but im trying. I had redhat9 on this machine and everything was working fine, specifically I was able to surf the net and transfer about my home network no problem.

tonight, for no other reason then just to keep up with the times, I installed fedora core 3. right out of the gate, my internet is way slow. transfer rates of .6 kb/sec. It has a difficult time loading google. it is plugged into a linksys router which splits my cable modem. the windows box sitting right next to it plugged into the router is downloading at my normal 2000 something kb. i dont know anything about the network card. it is found, recognized, and seemingly configed by fedora at startup. it has the standard linksys ip (192.168.1.10x) and like i said it gets to the net, its just unbareably slow.

id be a lot more comfortable if i was getting no net, instead of this half way there internet. is there some obvious config that i should do or something that i can check?

check /etc/resolv.conf and make sure your nameservers are listed. If not, put them in there and see if that solves your problem.

You may want to look at some tools like ping, traceroute, and tcpdump.
you can run traceroute to see if there connection is hanging at a certain hop, though it's doubtful if you've tried other sites or the same one with the other computer on the network.
I've read a few people having this same problem, though with no absolute answer.
try a dmesg | grep eth0
One person did get it working fine after a kernel upgrade. You may want to download the kernel rpm on the windows computer and copy it to the fedora one.

Also, is only internet slow, or is browsing the network slow also?

browsing the network is slow. i have a laptop with core 3 installed without any problems. the nameservers were different on the laptop, so i changed the slow machine to match the laptop. this sped things up a bit, but then i was only downloading round 6 kb, still very very slow for a cable modem. i will try these other things and play around a bit. hopefully something will help a bit more.

here are the results of dmesg | grep eth0

[root@localhost etc]# dmesg | grep eth0
divert: allocating divert_blk for eth0
eth0: no IPv6 routers present