SuSE 9.0 and Slackware 9.1, Let's make SuSE fast as Slack
 

Okay here is my reasoning for even asking this, I've had a dual boot w/ XP and SuSE 9.0 on a 1GHZ Celeron 384 MB machine and SuSE is still faster at everything than XP is. (actually XP wins the bootup speed, but I don't mind if SuSE is taking it's good ol time to make my computer secure and fast :)) Alright, So i'm happy lalala.

Then I install Slack 9.1 on my Pentium MMX 233MHz 192 MB RAM and it runs just as well as XP does (not exactly catchin SuSE yet, but almost) My question is how can Slack be so fast on such a slow machine while it would seem if a machine is 4 times faster, the OS would be 4 times more respondant and faster...but SuSE is about the same as Slack on the slow machine.

How can I optimize SuSE to run faster...what files determine what happens at bootup? How can I change which programs automatically start? When I press ctrl-esc (in KDE) on SuSE I see over 100 processes going..most of which I don't need...I want to stop them from autoloading without deleting them.

basically two questions to sum it up:

1 -- how can I change all the stuff that happens between Lilo and KDE
2 -- how can I change all the stuff that starts running in general...

Have a look at the configuration utility and see which services are enabled that you don't need. that'll speed up startup.
This thread might help.

configuration utilities? what init files in /etc should I be looking at?