Does anyone know why Knoppix ran faster off a CD on my old computer than an installed version of Mandrake 10.1? I am having some real performance issues with my Pentium 2, 64MB RAM, 8MB video ram, 6.4GB HD computer when running Mandrake using KDE. I used the same window manager with Knoppix and it was much faster. Are their any settings that can help improve Mandrake work better? The only difference between the two distros is the kernel version. Knoppix uses 2.4 and Mandrake has 2.6. Would the newer version slow down my computer?

when you say your "old computer" do you mean an older computer or a different computer than the one you are using now?

64 MB of ram is really stretching it for kde..

when you are in kde, how much ram is being used?

Mandrake, Fedora, Suse and a lot of other distros have all services turned on by default so the user wont need to know anything. user friendly! absolutely kills performance though. you will have to edit your init scripts and turn all the bloated stuff off, but if you are new you will first have to learn what each one does, because if you turn off that is needed that functionality will be goo too. You could manually do it with a text editor or maybe mandrake has some special GUI tool for it, don't know as i don't use mandrake.

When I said old computer I meant a computer that is six years old that I got out of a box and decided to try out Linux on it. I tried both Knoppix and Mandrake on the same computer.

I would urge you to add more RAM if you want KDE to run smoothly. I have run it using a machine with 128MB sdram and it was sluggish when multitasking. Try getting a 256MB+ chip.

I wouldnt recommend running KDE is its anything under 512MB.. you can always install kde and use a different WM to run kde programs. I know the recommended RAM is 256 but it just doesnt do it.. Try a bloat free distro like Vector linux.

no the newer kernels are actually alot faster than the older ones due to huge improvements in scheduling