I have been checking out www.distrowatch.com and noticed that many distros are compiled to run on i386. The are some that run on i586, and even fewer that run on i686 architechure.

Does this mean that these are not going to use my CPU to its fullest potential?

I have a P3 750, an Athlon XP 1700+, and an Athlon XP 1800+.
They also all have 512mb ram, and 40GB harddrives.

Which one should I be using to get the most features and speed out of my system?

Do distros like Redhat detect what you have and update it for you from the default?

I have no knowledge of compiling my own kernel optimizations, so try to avoid telling me to do so if you can. Thanks

I just think thay having software that is not optimized for your particular system leave you with a sense of feeling cheated some how.

In addition to the above mentioned...
I can't understand why one distro like Redhat 8.0 supports my ATI All-in-Wonder 128 with OpenGL working fine when I select the All-in-Wonder Pro driver, but in Mandrake 9 for example there is no such driver listed, and if I use the ATI Rage 128 TV, then the openGL does not work. I tried Tux for testing Open GL and only Redhat works for me.
Don't all distros use the same available drivers for hardware?

How do I know that my Linux is optimized for every aspect of my PC hardware? (Like DMA on for ATA133 Harddrives)

You can get drivers from the ATI website I think, just like Nvidia now

Recompiling each program for your system will speed it up, hence part of Gentoo's popularity.
Tweaks to your kernel should to, by only enabling what you need.

Mandrake is for i586 iirc.

have you even tried linux yet?? you've written tombs of stuff on this site, but don't seem to have actually got any experience of it at all. i'd suggest just getting on with it and trying it, rather than spend the next 76 months speculating and debating it to oblivion.

I feel this is a perfect oportunity to present a link you should read..because I keep running into attitudes here on LQ unfortunately..

http://www.madpenguin.org/article.ph...&mode=&order=0

Specifically the part...

"I know you may not like hearing it, but the users in those forums
are a bunch of arrogant a--es. A little courtesy can go a long way. There's absolutely no need to treat newbies with such disdain. We were all newbies once and how can you ever think otherwise. I get irritated with what I think are stupid questions too, but I do not belittle someone for asking one. The worst thing we can do to each other as Linux users, as well as human beings, is to
degrade those with less knowledge than ourselves. The position we should take is that of a teacher and a mentor, not abusive a--holes. "

P.S. - If you've read any of my posts its pretty obvious that I have used Linux, and still am. Trying to stick with it and grow learning it.

Why are there so many nasty people in the Linux community? At least, I am sure there are an equal amount of nice and helpful people too. I just keep running into the wrong ones I guess.
I am only trying to learn, combined I probably only have about a month of hands on actual Linux experience, give me a break, huh.

Fun I don't mind, its the headaches that are anything but fun....but I'll stop asking so many questions if thats what you want. Maybe this forum should be renamed from LinuxQUESTIONS.org something else.

Even a mod's saying it now Paul. Go on, have some fun with the mighty penguin

to me the Linux headaches are the fun. I love puzzling out exactly how to run a PostgreSQL server, while trying to find out why Samba didn't compile with smbwrapper like I told it to (at least I think I told it to)
Finally discovering that I'd set the ownership wrong for the entire home directory and learning how to fix it was for me lots of fun. I guess I am like that because I don't have any users who get angry when the server is down for a while. No pressure at all, just simple enlightenment of the Linux way of things.

First of all I have to second chris, and I don't
mind you considering me an arrogant a******
for that. I'll just consider you an average teen-ager
(yes, I know you're > 30) with a lack of will/ability
to work things out for himself.

As a matter of fact they don't. The distributions
(Debian, Slackware, Gentoo - to just name a few
of the more common ones) that use a stock-kernel
from kernel.org do, RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE all
make their private little changes to the stock-kernels
and bundle that with their distribution.
Then there's a wide variety in little tools that
will try to figure out what hardware you got (also
quite distro-specific) and configure it for you.

By running
hdpam /dev/hdX
hdparm -Tt /dev/hdX

In windows you probably (not even knowing)
accepted that windows NT explicitly turned off
advanced features of Non-Intel CPUs? ...

Look, if your questions were primarily of a
technical-informational nature rather than being
a nagging pain in the a** people would respond to
you much friendlier (and certainly more willingly).


And if you looked at posts of people like Chris and
me in response to other users you'd find that we are
very friendly and helpful in at least 90% of the time,
and it's always guys with an attitude like yours that
find us arrogant. Thanks goodness there's not too
many of that kind around (yet), which makes life
much easier for us, and more exciting, since we
can concentrate on providing help rather than
trying to clean up the mess some parents made
bringing up a spoiled brat :}

I'm not surprised, however, that you refuse to
consider even for a split-second that the fault
in these discussions might be with you.

Wake up, Paul, the "nasty people" are you
and the likes.

Cheers,
Tink