Well you will have to forgive me for asking another question. I am wondering why the speed in Linux is not par to my Windows. I have a gig of hynix ram PC3200, 160gig hd with 8mb cache Athlon XP1800+. It runs very well on my windows OS yet on linux I notice lag. Is there any tweaks or settings that I should know? Thanks again for the help.

well just a shot in the dark here, but maybe you don't have dma enabled on your drive ?
if your main drive is in fact hda, then run this command and post the output ...
hdparm -cd /dev/hda

now first i will note that you have to run this as root, and second if your drive is not hda then replace it where necessary ..

Yes!!
recompile the kernel (use 2.6 series if possible) and customise/optimise it for ur specification

and.. for the dma thing, since u are using redhat, u can edit the /etc/sysconfig/harddisks or something like that to enable dma, readahead and a lot more!!

well just to save the trouble of editing files, just simply type :
hdparm -d1 /dev/hda
as root, to enable it ;-)

DMA Is enabled

# These options are used to tune the hard drives -
# read the hdparm man page for more information

# Set this to 1 to enable DMA. This might cause some
# data corruption on certain chipset / hard drive
# combinations. This is used with the "-d" option

# USE_DMA=1

As for recompiling the Kernel I have no idea how to go about doing that, i have read a few guides but it seems as though I would really have to know my command line and I am just not at that level yet.

well listen i already told you what to do, so if you don't want to just see what that command i wrote above outputs then so be it .....
cause if you look at what you just typed to us you will notice the (#)Pound symbol in front of the line, meaning it is commented out, or in lamens terms it is not using ...

so i'll state again...
open a terminal
type :
su -
type your root password
then type :
hdparm -d /dev/hda

it may very well be enabled already, but judging by what you showed us, then that means nothing cause it is a commented line ... so show the output of that command ...

as of the kernel ... no you really don't have to be a rocket scientist to do it ...
read my guide here i made an overly simplified version of howto compile the kernel ..

I follow what you directed me to do.

[mike@h24-108-224-140 mike]$ su
Password:
[root@h24-108-224-140 mike]# hdparm -d /dev/hda
bash: hdparm: command not found
[root@h24-108-224-140 mike]#
[root@h24-108-224-140 mike]#

did I type in the wrong command? thank you for all the help.

no you didnt type it wrong .... its just that /sbin is not in your PATH so it couldn't find the command cause it didn't know where to search for it ...
but not to worry its not an issue, just type the full command :
/sbin/hdparm -d /dev/hda

Or, use 'su -' as originally pointed out, rather than 'su'.
That will 'enable' the root environment which will have the /sbin in its path.

The speed of linux is a very general question that gets ask a lot in this forum.

Almost all the the modules (drivers) in LINUX have to be re-engineered. What this means the modules for chipsets, IDE, sound, tv tuners, MPEG decoders, video cards, etc are not optimized. LINUX doesn't run certain components into memory to speed up software loading like Windows. If you use LINUX for a whole day, you will see it gets a little faster at the end of the day for certain programs that you used that day. This is because LINUX caches the programs or data to be used next time instead of retriving it from the hard drive. Windows rarely caches programs well, so it loads some of the data into memory.

Compiling the kernel to hard code only the components that you need can increase computer speed because the utility modprobe doesn't have to do trial and error to find out what module works best with your devices. Compiling devices as modules adds overhead to the kernel so it takes a little more time to access certain devices.

Kernel versions 2.4.x or higher already sets the best settings for hard drives. You shouldn't have to worry about changing the IDE specs for hard drives. You probably may have to do it for CD-ROM or DVD-ROM. You have to login as su or root and use sysctl to tweak your system's performance. I suggest doing research before jumping in and edit the /etc/sysctl.conf

I recently tried Redhat 9.0. It was slower than Mandrake 9.0 and Redhat doesn't have usb and the paths setup properly. I like how Mandrake is litle more soft when it comes to making partitions. On my setup I put the swap partition near the front of the drive. I can not tell if my system is using my swap. For my /boot, /, and /home partitons I used different filesystems like ext3 for /boot, xfs for /, and reiserfs for /home. XFS speed up my system a lot and I haven't yet had any problems with programs.