I installed Mandrake 8.1 on a system yesterday. Intel PII 400, 64 mbs ram, 4 Gb Hd.
First question is that it appears to run slow, i.e. when opening an application, it seems to take a while to open. Is this normal and if not, what should I be looking for?

Second question is that in the hardware section that lists the hardware, (a version of device manager), I have a few items that have question marks by them. I am assuming at this point that it has to do with either the processor and/or Motherboard. I am at work now and can't remember the exact message, but one has 'Bridge' in it and some if not all have 'Intel' in the message.
Thanks

A few more meg of ram will speed things up, as for the unknown device thing...as long as it works then I wouldn't worry about it too much.

the newer distros of linux, like mandrake 8.1, are written to run on a much more recent computer than the one you have it on. it will still run, but it will also be pretty slow at times. distro's like mandrake or redhat are made for user-friendlyness, not for speed. there's a definite trade-off between the two. if you want things speeded up any, besides adding more RAM, you'd want to use a more stripped-down linux distro, like slackware or debian.