Well the normal thing to do is create a swap partition during installation. But if you don't want to reinstall or you don't have any unpartitioned space on your hard drive then you could create a swap file. If you click on the link below and scroll down to the part about the swap file

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/l...ap-adding.html

A word of caution: In step 5, add that line below the line for the partition that is going to contain the file.

If the computer has a single memory module check if there is a part number on it. You should make sure it is acually a 128Mb module. If it is 256mb but the board reports it as 128, it means your module is bad. You should change it as soon as possible. Bad memory will always leed to hard to track problems! The same think is true if you have 2x128mb. It means one of the module (or the socket in which the module is) is bad.

As for swap space, you need to create a swap partion on your hard disk. Similar to the partitions you created to install Linux. If you dont have any space left on the disk you will need to resize (if this is still a new install, reformatting and starting over might be simpler for you).

To create the partion, you will use fdisk (like "fdisk /dev/hda" if you want to have swap on the 1rst disk).
To format the partion you will use mkswap (like "mkswap /dev/hda2", /dev/hda2 being the partion you created with fdisk)
Then you will need to add a line in your /etc/fstab to tell the OS that you have a swap partition. It will look similar to this:
Where /dev/hda2 will have to actually be the disk partion you created.

You should try to google for swap partition. There are a lot of good step by step how-to out there to enable a swap partition.

Mandrake Control Centre->System->Services will show you all the daemons (services) and allow you to stop/start and disable/enable them. This GUI is a frontend for the chkconfig and service commands which in turn manipulate the scripts in init.d and rc.X that BoldKiller was talking about in an earlier post.

In my experience, the root cause of the problem is usually not a shortage of RAM, but a seriously under-performing disk I/O subsystem. Many computers use the built-in, "convenient" IDE-type controllers that are built in to the motherboard ... but these can be ridiculously slow.

Consider purchasing a separate disk-controller card, and using this instead of what's built onto the main board. The difference in speed can be considerable.

Also consider using more sophisticated technologies such as FireWire and SCSI, which support much higher transfer-rates and extensive parallelism. Once again the secret is in a ~$100 card.

The disk transfer parameters (hdparm) that are used by your system at startup are often conservative... and therfore slow. Simple "tuning" of the system can have very impressive results.