I'm using Redhat 9.0 on Pentium III 667MHz, got 190mb SDRAM and 40GHz Hdd.
All the drivers are going well as i am.

Question 1:
Since my linux is slower then my Windows XP, I just want to know how can i increase it's speed.
I noticed that redhat 9.0 uses huge of memory. (always over than 170mb from my RAM were used)
Can i remove certain un-needed services that runing the background especially while booting-up.
How can i do that? As i'm really blue newb, hope u can tell me its step.
I still want to use X-window.

Question 2:
I am one of the thousand clients in our campus LAN. Is there any tool that supports for GUI LAN messaging.
I want to SEND and RECEIVE messages from my friends but most of them are using Windows.
somebody told me that i can use :smbclient -M hostname <messagetext> but i also want to read thier messages.
Is there any GUI application to handle this thing?

Question 3:
Using GNOME, how to make shortcut icon that links to certain folder. I tried by create a New Launcher by right-clicking on the desktop, but have found errors on nautilus. Tell me step by step.

Thank you in advance.

You need to say in what way it is slow. Do you mean the boot up time, the responsiveness of the windowing environment (KDE/Gnome/etc.), the speed it takes programs to start or to run, or something else.

You can certainly remove unneeded processes while booting up - look at the chkconfig command. However, the memory thing may be a red herring. Linux tends to pre-allocate memory in case it needs it later. Memory showing up as used probably isn't really. A better guide to whether you are short of memory is whether or not the system is using swap space. Use "free" to check how much swap space is being used. If none, don't worry about memory.