Hi all

I'm new to Slackware and fairly new to Linux.

Anyhow I'm finding that downloading anything for some reason takes up to 80% of the CPU's resources. Yesterday the PC froze from trying to download a bunch of jpegs in Pan. As I write this I'm downloading a large iso via ftp in mozilla firebird. The download speed is uneven and consumes between 5% and 80% of the CPU depending on how fast it is going.

Before I put a bunch of effort into fixing the problem I wanted to ask some seasoned pros her if I am on the right track to problem solving.

I had some similar issues running Mepis and Fedora but not well running SUSE. I think the difference is that installed a Kernal that was optimized for my AMD chip under With slack and the others I just used the default kernal.

Do I need compile a kernal optimied for AMD processors? In this case an AMD Athlon XP 2000+. If so are there any issues specific to the XP series that I need to watch out for?

If not what else could it be?

Oh, and I installed using the /current directory and am using the latest KDE.

Thanks

I'm not aware of any issues like this but as a starting point I would try using another program to download your files and see if that makes a difference. For instance try using wget (the -c will let you resume broken downloads):
wget -c ftp://ftp.blah.com/file.iso

That was my first thought when it first happened with Mozilla and http or ftp protocols. But then it did the same with NTTP using Pan. And there really are not very many reasonable alternatives to what I need Pan to do under Linux. Not without jumping through a lot of hoops that I don't want to jump through anyhow. I really need to figure out how to fix this so I can use that.