Hi all. I have been making an effort to switch from Windows XP to Linux. I installed different distributions: Mandrake 10.1, Ubuntu 5.10, kubuntu 5.10, Suse 10.0 and Slackware 10.2. None of these was even close to performance than Windows XP. My computer is not that bad, Celeron at 1.1Ghz, 384 MB RAM, and I have a separate hard drive I use for Linux, with 15 GB on it. Still, all the distributions I installed run very slowly.
I have Mandrake 10.1 running acceptably in my office PC (though also slower than Windows) , but that is a much faster machine. Still, I feel that my computer is not obsolete , the proof is that it runs Windows XP confortably, so it looks like if you don't have a really powerful computer you can't run linux??????
I am a little disapointed, I heard that one of the advantages of linux was that you could run it on any machine and that your hardware would not get obsolete, but I am not sure that's true. I also heard that linux is very good for servers, which may be true, but I wan't to use my computer as a home pc and it doesn't seem that linux is good for that.
Anyway, I want some advice. May be there is a way to make linux perform at least as good as XP, and if there is please tell me because I would like to try. All I want from my computer is to run a desktop environment and the software I need, which is not much. I surf the web, write in Latex, and use some applications. Surfing the web, for example, is a lot faster in Windows with Mozilla than what it is in Linux with Mozilla. And to launch Mozilla, and other apps, takes a lot longer under Linux. I really got frustrated using Linux, since everything takes a long time. So far it seems that for my purposes Windows is a much better choice. Any opinions? Thanks

you'll come back to linux the next time you get a virus or worm because of windows buggy code.........

Don't get me wrong, I would love to run Linux, it just seems it is much slower that XP for GUI applications. I haven't so far had problems with viruses in Windows either.

Did you tweak your system to suite your needs e.g. disable services you don't use for faster boot up, changed the timeout for grub or lilo, uninstall apps that you don't use, have a decent swap space etc.

Check to see if DMA is activated for your drives.

That'd be my first port of call. Those specs are a fry cry from recent (as you already seem to realise) but that should even be running a full KDE or GNOME setup without breaking a sweat. Try typing this at a prompt and let us know what it says, you'll need to be root.
You said you had linux installed on your second drive? Try running is with hda as well, just to see if it's on for both disks. Oh and just for future reference, it wouldn't kill you to use paragraphs when you post. Or just randomly press Enter every couple of full-stops. That post was a killer on my eyes that should have been asleep a few hours ago!