Hello. I was wondering if anyone can help me squeeze the most performance out of my system.

Currently, I'm running Mandrake 9.0 on a 1.6GHz system with 256MB of RAM. For a while now, I've thought that my system ran quite fast (Windows ran just a little bit faster). However, I was just at one of my university's Linux boxes (running Red Hat 7.3) and that system just SCREAMS! It's a 1.3GHz with 512MB of RAM, compared to my 1.6GHz. Now, in all of my computing days, I've never seen RAM make as much of a difference as it seems to here. In fact, the slower computer seems to run faster than my 2.4GHz Windows XP computer at work. The university machine is also running Gnome 1.4 and KDE 3.0.3, both of which outperform anything I've ever seen in the Linux world from my home computer.

Obviously I'm a little envious and would like to get my system running just as fast (or faster) than the 1.3GHz machine. Can anyone give me any tips on general performance tweaking? I'd like my system to load apps faster and render graphics in X-Windows at least as fast as the slower computer.

Any hints would be more than greatly appreciated. Thanks.

one thing which might be holding your pc back is hdd performance!
ensure dma is on
using the hdparm tool from the console

also do a hdparm -t /dev/hda (or what ever your hdd is) to check your drives speed

if you get an error when trying to run hdparm, install the package off of one of your mandrake cd's it's called "hdparm" and i think its on the first of the 3 cd's

Hardware wise, most people underestimate the impact of extra memory. It is one of the cheapest speed boosts available.

Check out the LFS section here and their website. If you want to get the most from Linux, learn how to optimize it for the computer it is on.

Also, did you ask the folks at the college what they did to get Red Hat tweaked so well? They'd probably enjoy the opportunity to brag a little about their work.

Finally, don't expect any one thing (other than memory) to make a huge difference. It will more likely be a whole bunch of small improvements.

Good luck