Also, a system is only as strong as its weakest link, processor power isnt everything. I refrain from throwing some curse words out there but I am not. This is not the place. I am not going to argue with you back and forth like people do in other forums. Just try to answer the quetion and fix the problem instead of attacking other peoples ideas; that is the point.

Do you have any swap partitions? Having one can make a lot of difference to performance.
Type 'free' and see if it shows any swap space.

I have a 1 gig swap space, I changed the cable to the drive, the one in there was an 80 pin but i changed to another 80pin for the heck of it and checked my dmesg, same read errors, I just remembered too, when i install a distro, i don't run a bad block scan usually, but awhile back i did, and it came up with bad blocks and cancelled the install, i figured that the scan was messed up and installed w/o the scan, what exactly is a bad block? Could the hard drive be damaged?

Yes, your hard drive could be bad. If you have another one, try putting it in your system and reinstall your distro.

Name_in_use...as to me being a "newbie", that applies to the number of posts and not my knowledge of Linux. Thank you. I don't want to start a war of words either but I just couldn't help but chime in when you recommend dumbing down a system. If uninstalling a desktop environment is the solution to a problem like this, then that machine has some serious problems and I'd recommend, at the very least, a totally fresh install after doing a low-level format of the hard drive (do this ONLY IF YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING and then, this would only solve your bad block issues...maybe). There is an FSCK option as well that can be used to repair bad blocks if there is not physical damage to the hard drive. And for the record, I have been a computer technician for 21 years.

Good day sir!

Without addressing the Name in use guy, (ha newbies, too funny.) Bluedude - you have a hardware problem. By all means you should be able to run linux in a literal screaming configuration on what you have for hardware. I suppose I could throw out some unintelligible reason at you, like some other poster, but I am looking at what dmesg put out. A drive seek error is a hardware issue. Hardware issue. Hardware . . . issue . . . Ok. So since you have a relatively fast processor compared to this 400mhz amd, and that in fact that does matter, (no matter what fool says other wise) you would hope that it would be faster than a 100mhz fsb based, socket 7 mobo. Am I right? Either that or you'd have brought it back to the store by now. You know, vice killing your DE and settling. We can look at these possible solutions now.

1) Bad drive
2) Bad cable
3) Bad Hard drive controller
4) Running your hard drive at too high an ATA.

Now the hardware is obviously a swap and rebuild of your OS. If not that, then download hdparm and try running the hard drive at a lower ata speed and see if this helps. Problem is tho, that if it does help, then you have a hardware problem. IE, the hard drive isn't running at its rated spec with the correct mobo. However, if you do run it at ata100 and no longer get hard drive errors, and you are satisfied with the speed versus buying a new hardware component, then I would put the hdparm command in a startup script and go about my merry way. We can go over this in more detail after you've found your problem if you like. Another possible fix is to upgrade to a 400mhz k62. lol j/k. I mean after all, some think you can make it go faster. Even your weakest component on the setup you have should dwarf the speed of that 400mhz.


Sincerely,

The recently created newbie,

Druisgod

sorry no reply in awhile, but suse is still slow, i ran TOP and found this, it looks like 93% of my processor is being used by id.
heres output
top - 01:04:17 up 11:40, 1 user, load average: 0.61, 0.42, 0.28
Tasks: 86 total, 2 running, 84 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 4.7% us, 1.3% sy, 0.0% ni, 93.4% id, 0.0% wa, 0.3% hi, 0.3% si
Mem: 646672k total, 643328k used, 3344k free, 71252k buffers
Swap: 2015992k total, 65696k used, 1950296k free, 303728k cached

Am i reading this correct and if so what is that using all the cpu?

id is the idle task, so your CPU is not at all busy. Can you post the complete output, and maybe also output from "vmstat 1 15" so we can see what's going on. As others have said, this is probably a hardware issue.

Well I gave up on 9.1, downgraded to 9.0 and all i can say is WOW!, 9.0 is 10 times as fast as 9.1, its 20 times more stable, I love 9.0, only problem is is that alot is outdated, but no problem, i little updating sure beats slow and unstable!

Hmmm. I hate to think of this as a solution, but if you are satisfied with it, then no complaints here. Might you try a reinstall? Is it possible that your reinstall downgrade repaired the issues with the hardware? Try 9.1 again. Its possible that an OS reload could of repaired the issue. Happens all the time. While it's possible that 9.1 wasn't a great OS compared to 9.0 (we've all seen plenty of examples of software regression) it would be great if you at least had later updates. If it doesn't work, I would go back to 9.0, or we can still work on the 9.1 problem. A major problem with software regression is if there were security issues.


Druisgod

Well i tried before reinstalling aftaer a fresh 9.0 and no luck, thanks for all the help

Something else to consider before you completely give up on anything current.

What kernel version did 9.0 use vs. 9.1?

Having run Slackware since 8.0 and tooling around with other various distros (including SuSe) I can tell you one of the things that makes a huge difference with any distro/version is the kernel version they use.

If you want to use an updated version of SuSe try compiling your own kernel specific to your hardware. With a little tooling around you may find out you aren't using the best configuration for your particular hardware.

Linux hangs up often if you have bad (malfunctioning) RAM memory.
I had and i saw this hanging problem often.
Try to remove the "bad" RAM module (usualy there is one wrong).
Beware running windoze with bad RAM, you will damage all manipulated data (trust me) !!!