After toying around with Mandrake and a little with Ubuntu, I decided to try out the FC - especially since everyone has been recommending it to me.

After I installed FC2 and rebooted, I noticed that it was taking incredibly long to load. Infact, it takes a disgusting amount of time. I finally got to the desktop, and the system lags! I checked the system moniter and my CPU is running at an average of 80% constantly! Nothing was happening, and the CPU was working like a dog...what on earth is up?

System specs:
AMD64 3400+ (yes, I have the amd_64 version of FC2)
2 GB RAM (only 157 mb of this was being used when I checked it out)
80 GB Harddrive
Radeon 9700 128 MB

I'm really not in the mindset to head back to Mandrake - so any help given is appreciated! Thanks!

Try running "top" at a bash prompt then press P to sort by CPU usage - which proccess is eating all of your CPU?

open a terminal like xterm or konsole, and type

top

and it will list all the things running, you can tell from there what is using up all your cpu

my 2 cents: first, i've noticed a lot of people talking about sluggish cpu performance in the 2.6.x kernels, you might do a little reading on that subject if FC2 uses one (which i don't know). second, if you're looking for a stable, fast, and secure setup, my personal recommendation is slackware + fluxbox. i know that's not you question though, so ignore it if you like.

Alright, I managed to get a terminal up and checked out "top"

I found that "X" was sucking up most of the processing power, along with "gnome-panel". Also, I noticed that anything I ran immediatly jumped to taking about 25% processing power (such as "gnome-terminal" or "gnome-sys-monitor").

yea there must be something wrong with x settup
check logs i guess and look for errors or strange output
i'm running kernel 2.6.3 right now x usage moves between 2.00 and .25%
firefox is taking between 2.00 and .50%
ksysguard to check usage is using 2.50%

thats a total of 6.5%CPU.. where the other 73.5% you said was being used ?

anyways.. fedora is a bloated distro.. if you want performance, go for gentoo.

No no, that was the other guy giving examples of what his computer runs at.

Someone told me to try this:

chmod -x /etc/init.d/cpuspeed

and then restart. We'll see what happens.

I'm worried about going to something like gentoo or slackware because my knowledge of Linux is still at the beginner stage - and I'm fairly sure both those distribitions demand a bit more than that.

it all depends on how much you want to learn. if you switch to slackware you're gonna have to do some reading, but if you don't mind that, you'll be so happy in the end! the only things i would worry about for a first time install of slackware are fdisk and x configuration. read up on how to partition a hard drive using fdisk, and how to configure x with xorgconfig, and you'll be able to get slackware up and running in no time. it's really not as hard as people make it sound.

I know enough to do things like use fdisk and such. I'm more worried about things like configuring xorg, getting the network up and running (since 4/5 times I have installed Linux it can't bring up my eth0 interface), etc. I've got 2 O'Reilly books and I read a lot online...I'm on my way, heh. If things don't turn out with FC2, I will probably try Slackware out - assuming it has a 64-bit version. Otherwise, it looks like its learn-or-die gentoo .

I'll update again after I run the above command.

I dove right in with Slack, and haven't ever needed to find another distro. As stated, it's a lot of learning (read: work) to get everything configured, but by the time you're done you know your system (and Linux in general) like the back of your eyelids

Alright, well I tried running cpuspeed, but unfortunatly that doesn't seem to exist anymore. A check of the directory confirmed this, heh.

So unless anyone has any other ideas, I might have to move distributions - because FC2 is unusable in this state.

cpu speed is just a daemon that slows your cpu when its not in use to save power.

anyways,,, so what is taking up 80% when you are doing nothing ?
what program ? and if you dont use it, turn it off.

my pentium 2 266 mhz runns kde with only 6% processor in use while idle.

slackware 10 runs great on an old PII machine i have, i forget exactly what the speed is, but it's only got 64m of RAM. looking at top, with a few aterms and gkrellm running it's only comsuming about .7% cpu, and about 15% memory. very clean, very stable, and i really haven't done much to it yet.