I recently downloaded Suse 10.0 and installed same on my machine. The system configuration is as follow

PIII 5000 MHZ Katmai
Kazaa i810 Motherboard (On Board Graphics)
256 MB SDRAM
15'' LG 52V Monitor
Generic PS/2 Optical mouse
101 Generic TVS Gold Keyboard

I found Suse boot bit slow but not too slow and also Gnome took much time on startup. Same provlem for YaST, it opens after long time. Also help to enable DRI for improved graphics.

Please help me to tweak my system to improve performance because I switched to Suse after testing so many distros like Slackware 10.2, Red Hat 9, Fedora 3, Mandrake 2004, Arch 0.7.1. Since I found slackware much faster then all but the graphics problem in slackware make me attracted towards suse.

Thanks

On an older system like yours, you may get some speed increase from recompiling your kernel (the base of the OS). Google for recompiling the kernel. Also, you may try something less memory intensive than Gnome. Try to install xfce4, icewm, windowmaker, or another light weight window manager. You'll be missing some bells and whistles, but it'll be a lot more responsive.