I just installed Mandrake 8.2 on my system. AMD K62 400. Now I know my system is no speed deamon. but, Mandrake was so slow I could not even attempt to use it. I've since gone back to 7.1 (The only other ISO I had/could find)

Does anyone have any ideas why?

Walter.

Try a different Window Manager than KDE or GNOME. That's one way to actually test your speed. Try building kernels in each version to actually see if it's truly slower, or if it's something else. Kernel is not a good way to benchmark, but it is a good way to see if you are having major system draws and such. The way I test it with the kernel recompile idea is I type 'date' right before I hit enter on make bzImage && then I type 'date' again, and hit enter, after it's done building it will display the date and I compare the 2 from the 2 different distro's. The times are exact, but they are usually all within about a good 30 seconds of each other (I account this to human error).

Also, Mandrake 8.2 is optimized for i586 systems, I am not sure what a K62 400 is, but maybe you need to "down" optimize or degrade your kernel.

Cool

I believe the K6/2s are covered by i586... they somewhat more advanced (arch wise) than the i486s! I think they are on a par with P2, so it should be fine. However, KDE and Gnome (moreso for KDE, I find) are complete memory hogs. Mandy 8.2 comes with KDE 2.2.2 (I think) by default, wheras 7.1 comes with 1.something... and there-in lies a probable reason for the apparent differences in speed. I personally like using SawFish, but that's personal preference, and there are already far too many threads on 'Which Window Manager is best?', so we're not going to start one here.

Hope this helps.

When I switched over from RedHat and Mandrake to Slackware, I noticed it was much faster. I think mainly b/c RH and Drake run a lot of other daemons in the background by default (like Kudzu, Portmap, GPM, etc..). Alot of those you will never use, so I suggest you get rid of them.

I also agree with the window manager part too. I use WindowMaker myself and am big fans of Blackbox and Fluxbox.

I say you play around with it and see what happens. If all else fails, try a different distribution. Libranet is a great transitioner from the RH based to more advanced distro's.

Good luck

-biosx