I followed the directions I could find on several webpages and got the nvidia.run file to go. I edited my XF86CONFIG then noticed there was no driver section.

So I went back to nVidias docs and based on it edited the XF86CONFIG-4 instead, sure enough there was the section in question.

But my videa still seems slow... for example when I choose logoff in gnome I see several slow and obvious screen refeshes as it greys out the screen.

Is that normal? And is there any where I can double check if the driver is loading correctly?

Mandrake 9.2 BTW.

can you enable DMA??
open a term window and type this.......hdparm -Tt /dev/hd?
substitute drive letters for ?
post what you see.

Do not know if I can enable DMA, I'll try to find out how... as for your command it returned this:

/dev/hda:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 648 MB in 2.00 seconds = 324.00 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 90 MB in 3.04 seconds = 29.61 MB/sec

/dev/hdc:
Timing buffer-cache reads: 656 MB in 2.01 seconds = 326.37 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 4 MB in 3.05 seconds = 1.31 MB/sec