I'm used to quick distros like Arch, Slack, Gentoo and i'm on deb sid at the moment, it is a little bit slow for what i'm used to. So i really want to try fedora because it has some interesting bleeding edge stuff, but is it fast? i have a pentium 4 with 256 of RAM.

Very very fast. For an "easy" distro that is.

It compares with my Arch and gentoo installations in speed. It's not quite as fast, but it is pretty damn impressive figuring on how FC2(the last one i used) was unbelieveably slow.

But there are a few bugs, like the RHN-applet(the little checkmark in the gnome panel that tells if you have updates available) never changes even if there are updates available.

just don't use bloated desktop manager like kde or gnome. Use more light desktop manager like xfce. Or if you are the extremist, use fluxbox. Then try to use light program. Don't use evolution or kmail. Use sylpheed. And the list goes on. FC4 ( I admit ) is slower than Arch or GEntoo with same program and desktop manager. But not that much...... I can compromise the speed.

I'd give a conditional "fast" response. It is noticeably quicker in most respects as compared to FC3, after an upgrade, so I'll attribute it to the version itself and not just that it's a clean install, which gives good results sometimes too. I use Gentoo at work, and that is faster still, but then, it's all relative. You can install a rather large package of software on Fedora in seconds, as opposed to quite some time under Gentoo.

All in all I'm really pleased with the Core 4 upgrade, including the troublefree upgrade itself. Only remaining issue is wine, which I use for DVD Shrink and Decrypter, which suddenly works for neither version.

Boots faster than FC3 and works faster too. I really like it.