Sorry, that's just plain wrong. People can't just buy things..a support contract is for SUPPORT, not purchases. Try to purchase anything, and you're either going to be asked for a valid purchase order number, or a credit card.
..and THIS is just plain dangerous. You're telling a new Linux user:

• To manually add repositories...
• ...on a machine they DO NOT OWN
• ...that they don't even have the rights to modify
• ...that has a prebuilt image from their company

Mixing repos is a risky/difficult thing to do if you're EXPERIENCED.

OP: We will be happy to try to help you, but I want to remind you again that if you do things on an administrative level to your company-owned system, it MAY cost you your job. Company IT policies can be fairly draconian, and unless you KNOW you have the rights to do what you're after, you may be out of work if you're caught. Personal feelings aside, that's just the way it is in corporate IT world.

Then he's going to have to take it to the IT people at his company or contact RedHat support, and any further continuance of this thread is more or less pointless, am I right?

It's his -/+ buffers/cache line that is showing 80% usage, so it's real, it's not disk cache (what your link is referring to).

I ran the Top command and watched it for several minutes. The heavy hitter on memory use is the Win7 KVM that I have to run to access client systems. However, the KVM is usually the last thing I start up and the performance issues with the linux apps is prevelant before that is ever started.

Let me say that being new to Linux and this being a company issued machine, I don't plan on doing anything that might jeopardize it's operation or my job for that matter. I'm hoping that someone will be able to point me in the right direction for getting this fixed, hopefully using diagnostics already inherent in Linux that will pinpoint the problem. Armed with that information, I can then find my way through the support food chain to someone that will take that information and either allow me to fix it or tell me how to get it fixed. I would hope they would not ignore the fact that I would have done the diagnostic work for them and at least get me on the path to getting it fixed.

Have you tried running top while the performance issue is going on, to see if some process is stealing the CPU?
Does your laptop have a HDD or SSD?

- Did you prep your laptop yourself or did IT dept. supply it?
- Was the OS tuned for laptop use?
- What system services are running?
- Are there any clues in dmesg, system or daemon logs, Xorg* or your ~/.xsession-errors log files?
- What Desktop Environment do you run?
- Does the delay occur with all applications or just some?
- For a (any relatively "simple") application that seems slow loading, could you attach plain text output of running 'strace -Cttwv /usr/bin/whateverslowapp'?

the Microsoft win7 VM running in kvm will do it

do you really NEED windows7 to boot in the Virtual machine on boot ?
i would turn that OFF

for what programs is it needed
there might be a redhat replacement for that program