Mr chicken dude you sound linux green and possiobly bewilderd of wut to do next hdparm and various edits of your bootup scripts will definatley help you but I suggest that you choose a real distro for the job.. obviously you have windows for your computing needs, and you just want to try linux for your own learning and a hobby which is great. GUI tools come and go the commands behind them stay the same.
My suggestion is to use either SLACKWARE which will be FAST or Gentoo which is very fast. Both are more to the source of linux, Gentoo requires a great amount of time for installation but is very informative, a great way to boost a n00bs linux career to another level quickly (its well documented step by step). SLACKWARE is simple to install, set up reasonably well of the bat and is truely a great linux distro for learning and the advanced user.
GOT SLACK
as for AMSN I have found that if you dont compile it your self and jsut use binaries in: fedora redhat mandrake and debian..its a little unstable use GAIM its far better

I can't help very much, But I would check the hard disc driver it may not be the most appropriate driver or may need some tweeking. Hope this is helpful.
Best of luck.

bavarian: can u please tell us how to optimize fedora and make it faster?
i had just read that, it can be done by recompile the kernel, but, can u just tell me, the correct way ,

Fedora usually includes all of the available drivers for hard discs. You may not need to recompile a kernel unless you are using a very old hard disc. In this case you will to get the correct kernel source file from Fedora and install it. It is VERY IMPORTANT that you copy the config file from /boot to the /usr/src/linux directory and make sure you rename it .config NOTE the dot at the start, this makes it a hidden file. In Linux any file starting with a dot is hidden. You can list with "ls -a" or "ls -la". This should give the settings for your current kernel.
Read the README file in /usr/src/linux directory. It will guide you through the process. I don't find this advisable for anyone with 2 days experience to actually do this. But sometimes you need to be VERY brave to sort out a problem.
If you accomplish then task then you made a great achievement. If it fixes your problem then notify FC of what you did any why through there reporting system. I hope this readable because the keys on keyboard keep moving (heheh) and causes some errors.
The configuration you are interested is in the drivers section (I think)
DO NOT turn off anything just add drivers.
If you embark on venture then good luck and enjoy.

Ok, for starters.

Do you use any of these:

If not go turn them off. You can find the applet that controls services in Desktop>System Settings>Server Settings>Services.

If you dont run a mail server you dont neeed sendmail (also its a security risk).
If you dont use NFS for sharing between other linux computers, you can switch off anything in services that contains NFS, rpc or portmap in the description.
Do you access your computer from the outside over ssh, if not that can be killed as well.
Do you have a printer attached, if not kill cupsd.
Do you use howl, if not kill mDNSResponder and nifd.

All the above can also be considered security topics since running services you dont need is just leaving the gate open to a wider range of possible attacks.

On the Amsn point, have you not tried gaim. I use it without any probs on msn and the other networks.

If you must use Amsn though, you need to search for the method of installing a TLS driver, there is a vague reference to it in the gaim installation from src instructions, but it took me a couple of hours to do it last time. Then you will maybe have to recompile amsn with the tls support flag when you configure it.

On the point of gentoo, i have one thing to say, screw gentoo. If you want to learn about linux, do a linux from scratch installation. You will definetly learn a whole lot about your operating system, and how to do things the hard way. None of that emerge bs.

I also find Linux 'slow ' . And I just dont know what is happening. I am not ignorant about Linux have used it off and on since 1997 I think . But never for very long... That said .Linux is fun it gives you a lot to do and investigate. I recently got an HP PSC 1315 printer working after about 6 months of intermittent tinkering. Mostly My fault ( was selecting the wrong driver ).
But now another mystery is on hand .
I used to have FC1 and if that was slow I did not notice.
With Fc3, I count to at least 5 before ANYTHING comes up including the terminal . I also have TWO instances of Pdflush running . This is easy to see through TOP. I have 128 mb ram but this is the same as with FC1.

well 128 is not enough for X, try FC4 with gnome 2.12 - much faster...

*Honestly - make a statement like "Linux is slower than Windows at everything" and then wonder why we get defensive? Blanket generalizations tend to do that. (-: But I expect you've figured that by now.

On to Linux: I'm what you might call a "performance" user. My primary functions on a machine are programming, writing, and 3D graphics design...and I'm impatient. So I've gotten pretty good at squeezing performance out of Linux (and the old reclaimed hardware I run on):

With appologies to fans of KDE and Gnome...I stick to the fastest possible window manager for the task. In order of slowest to fastest, I use: Window Maker, Fluxbox, Blackbox, IceWM, and TWM. Yes, TWM looks ugly and I don't care. Even on the internet machine where it's more play than work, I stick to Fluxbox. Now, if you're still in love with KDE and Gnome apps, be assured that you can start anything just by typing it's name in a console window (KDE's panel is named "kicker", for instance. When you're done with it, xkill it.), and anything that can be accessed by console can also be entered into the menus of the respective window manager's main menu. Thus in Fluxbox, I just add the same line I would type in the console along with a menu item title to my menu file, and there it be! Also, I trim each window manager's settings for performance - I drag windows in outline instead of opaque, avoid desktop styles that use pixmaps, set the buttons to just what I need, keep the borders razor-thin, etc. My only compromise here is that I'm a transparency freak - so I can see my pretty wallpaper through anything, of course! - but if you don't care about that, turn it off, too.

Second, I prune religeously. If I don't use it, I don't install it, and I remove it from the menu. Be careful here: you can louse things up royally if you remove something that something else depends on. Also try typing "ps -aux" in a console and see what pops up - this will be all the processes currently running. Investigate what looks like bulk and see if you can toss it. Also, I use the fastest application for the job: file management I use xfm almost exclusively. All my text editing happens in either Emacs or a console running ed or cat. My web browser's default page is set to "blank", so I don't have to wait for a page to load before I tell it where I want to go.

Third: Probably the fastest installed system I can think of is Slackware. Mostly because it's a distro dedicated to providing the bare essentials and letting you add what you will. I also keep it in text-mode boot, then startx from the console. Everything about it seems faster than every other distro I've tried so far. Now, if you don't need to stick to strictly installed distros, your avenues open up. Damn Small Linux (by stopwatch!) boots for me in 59 seconds flat. Another excellent option is Puppy Linux, which once it's loaded from CD runs entirely from RAM. It also is small (@ 60 MBs total disk space to Damn Small's 50 MBs) and after it's second boot (first boot it configures a bunch of stuff and writes a small config file to disk), also comes up in a minute and 5 seconds. Both of these times, we're talking about power-on to desktop. Hint: Damn Small uses Blackbox for it's only window manager, Puppy uses IceWM. *EDIT: I stand corrected; it uses a modified version of FVWM2, kind of like FVWM95.

Now, internet is another story. I use Firefox. I don't overload it with too many custom add-ons, just the few I like. I never use chat. I try not to run too many internet processes, i.e. newsreaders and such. Even with Broadband/DSL connection it can make your system hang if, for instance, you load a Flash animation with the Firefox weather applet updating and KDE newsticker running on a Kasbar.
EDIT: I just discovered the biggest performance boost to Firefox on Fedora Core yet: going into preferences->advanced and un-checking "smooth scrolling". What that feature does is cache your mouse-wheel signals and even out the "bumps" in the movement, no matter how your fingers move. What it did to me is make the page move like warm taffy, then keep scrolling after I'd stopped moving it; It was driving me *nuts*!

Another thing I do: if there's a page that all I want to do is read it, and it's sporting tons of animated ads, I pop open a console and use lynx or w3m to read the page. This does wonders for plowing through the sludge of the web in general, in fact!

It would help if you gave us a clue what it is you're trying to do? There may, indeed, be things that happen faster on Windows than Linux - like, for instance, an Active-X-oriented game may run slower on Linux just because there's the overhead of running it from the WINE emulator.

all hail the mighty adblock

"linux is slow"

Realllly?? wow ..
Im in shock!!

Tell that to my 11 sec boot LFS box

your response is a little slow, however.

That last post is over 2 years old - I don't think he can hear you!