We have just installed Mandrake on a Pentium II with 128mb.

We previously used Knoppix and everything was OK.

With Mandrake, it takes forever to open any other program. For example, OpenOffice takes up to a minute to start, with Knoppix it took seconds.

I've searched the forums and read the suggestions regarding Mandrake slowing down over time, but this isn't our problem, it has been slow since the beginning.

We've tried hdparm, our parameters are:

/dev/hda:
multcount = 16 (on)
IO_support = 0 (default 16-bit)
unmaskirq = 0 (off)
using_dma = 1 (on)
keepsettings = 0 (off)
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 256 (on)
geometry = 16383/16/63, sectors = 16514064, start = 0

i understand we should only have 10-15 processes running (using ps -e | wc -l)

We have 58. Could this be the problem? How do we shut them down?

You don't. an installed distro has a lot more running processes than a live cd. It also has a lot more features than a live cd. Pentium 2? 128MB of ram? Sounds like it should be pretty slow and be perfectly normal. You probably want to stick with the live cd, or pick a version of mandrake that's as old as the computer itself so it'll run faster. Or just use gentoo so you can compile it just for your computer.

I would drop KDE for a lighter WM like Floxbox or ICEWM.

also, unless OpenOffice is required, why not settle with Lighter programs like AbiWord and Gnumeric?

But also, you could just stick with you Live CD, as well, or try SLAX which I have tried on a PC with similar specs as your and it works great!

Even DamnSmallLinux with the option to copying to RAM would work as an excellent alternative.

I would agree, you're asking too much of your older PC to run KDE. You would be better off running an older version of Mandrake or finding a less resource intensive distribution. I spotted this post a while back with someone recommending DeLi Linux. Might be worth a look.

Bill