I do not like it, #1 because it is not as good as running games as OTHER OS's hint hint. #2 I hate monthly fees, they drive me nuts. #3 I am a poor student I can't afford very much #4 Opensource should be free, I do not agree with trying to make a buck off of things like that.

FFS even people are trying to sell illegal music these days. If you want to sell legal music, go right ahead, but dont try to charge people for illegal stuff.

Staroffice? Why not use open office?

Star Office performs better and works better with Microsoft documents compared to Open Office. OpenOffice is basically an old version of StarOffice that people've been building off of since SO went commercial. I don't blame the people making SO for going commercial. In fact, I'm kind of glad they did because it stands a better chance of going against MS Office if it's commercial vs. GPL

Yeh, I do not particularily enjoy open office or abiword. I prefer doing things with MS word, which wow, is designed for .doc files The biggest peeve with OO is the stupid word completing and the inablilty to save many features as .doc files. When I write labs, it really doesnt like my tables, when I got to word in windows it messes them up. That kinda irritates me.

well, you could always save them as rtf pdf or swx as far as speed goes, try running a lighter weight window manager, enlightenment ratpoison blackbox fluxbox xfce try some of those they should make you computer much snappier, dependencies and such, hmm well fedora shouldnt be a problem you can use its graphical interface for apt-get or just use apt-get debian style your cpu shouldnt be running at 90% run top in a console and see what is hogging the cpu, then post here and well tell you if its a necessary system app or if you can tell for yourself run ps -A and look for the pid (the number next to the application name) then type kill 2294 or whatever the pid is

My problem with those faster desktops is that blackbox and the like are ugly. Flusbox is so nasty I feel like gagging, I cannot stand it. And all the similar ones do not have easy to use things. I just dont like them.

I think enlightenment is very very pretty

i installed the fedora core 2 and i got apps working great and faster than previous thingys..............

i donno what made it faster in the same hardware conf..
might be new kernel or anything
i am happy lol

Do a search for hdparm on google.

hdparm is a utility for tweaking your hd settings such as I/O support, DMA version, IRQmasking, power managment and multiple sector count. It can even do some pretty wild stuff that's also dangerous, such as setting the IDE Xfer mode.

Read the man hdparm and start experimenting with settings. First do hdparm -tT /dev/xxx (xxx being drive, such as hda or hdb), it'll give you a benchmark of the drive to try to beat with new settings. The first things to experiment with are the -d -c -m and -u options. Again, check the man hdparm for details. This might work quite well for you because your machine isn't that new. Some might get out twice the performance of their HDs using this method. I, having a fairly new machine, can only manage to increase the benchmark with about ten percent not getting into the more dangerous settings.

Good luck.