I just downloaded Kubuntu, and installed it to try it out. I was told with my 256MB of RAM however, that it should work excellent. It seems to be running pretty slow. What could be the problem?

you're running KDE on an 866 processor... not too suprising really.

if you run "free" you can see how much memory is being used. if you're pushing into swap at all then it's the ram suffering. Ram problems can also be seen from excessive cpu time being devoted to the kswapd process, visible in "top".

i'd doubt it was the RAM though. Remember that while many people use Linux because XP is resource grabbing bloatware, many other people still want that patronizing experience that XP provides them, irrespecive of resources and performance... hence KDE.

im quite a newbie at linux, and I was told that there were a couple thousand programs that were installed with linux, but when I click on the 'k' menu, and look at the programs, there are only a couple. Where can I find all of the others?

depends what you want... i don't use KDE ever though, but it does have a reasonable stab at menu management, so they should be ready categorized in there really.

I run Slackware and KDE on my 846 Mhz 256 SDRAM! It runs just fine!
I dont know what the problem is, but its not your speed and its definetly not KDE.
Did you set your swap partition to at least 512? As I remember, Kubuntu didn't
really ask me anything about setting up a swap partition.

I have no idea how much my swap partition is, but do you know how to change that by chance?

you wouldn't *need* a 512+ swap partition and these sorts of guesses aren't really that useful until we have some actual statistics... like what IS the output of "free" after an hours usage?

I have absolutely what you are talking about when you say IS output.

if there is a swap partition... then you'll be able to find out by opening "/etc/fstab" with kwrite.
one of the pratitions should be labeled as a "swap" format.
I doubt very much that kubuntu set one up for you.
You could try making a swap file. I have seen how-to's here and there about doing that... if you dont have anymore empty space left on your hard drive.

Open a terminal, type "free" without the quotes and post the output.

I would probably say upgrade the memory as it is cheap nowadays and would improve performance.