Just got Mandrake 8.2 running on my HP laptop. The laptop's specs are as follows: Athlon4 900mhz, 512 PC133 SDRAM, 20 gig HD, 8 MB video, and an 8x CDRW/DVD. Mandrake CRAWLS on this machine. What are the essential services I must have running and what can I turn off safely? I'd really prefer to turn them off in the command line so would that be in xinetd? The applications are slow to come up and the disk seems to be always running. I am using ReiserFS w/ partitions as follows: 3.1gig / partition, 512 mb swap partition, and a 3.2 gig partition. What is the optimal partitioning scheme? I have the following services running at boot: alsa, anacron, apmd, atd, crond, devfsd, gpm, harddrake, internet, keytable, kheader, medusa, netfs, network, partmon, pcmcia, portmap, random, rawdevices, sound, syslog, usb, xfs, and xinetd. Which ones do I need? I've already turned off quite few. Also, it seems that about 3 applications (shell, XMMS, Mozilla) ALWAYS come up on first boot. Driving me crazy. I have been careful to leave the box for "restore session when logging in next time" unchecked. So how do I get rid of that stuff appearing on login? I KNOW Linux is faster than this so teach this newbie.

I think you can turn off harddrake and netfs (if you don't use network filesystem).
To find out which processes take memory/processor power use top. Then you can trace those taking too much.

you can check if dma is enabled for your hdd. Infact enabling dma on the hard drive can increase performance quite a bit.

you can bench mark your hdd access time using
/sbin/hdparm -tT -m16 /dev/hda

try this
/sbin/hdparm -d -c /deb/hda
This will tell you if dma is enabled or not.
If dma is not enabled then do this
/sbin/hdparm -d1 -c1 /dev/hda
Do the bencg mark again, you should see a difference.
BTW you have to be root to do this. You'll have to redo the dma settings after reboot. Please check the man page for hdparm before doing anything. Some options can be risky.

- manas

There's also a slight chance that the machine is trying to use DNS to resolve it's own hostname when you run any X app.

Check your /etc/nsswitch.conf file to make sure "files" appears first on the line for "hosts:", like so:

hosts: files dns

Here's a run-down of what those services are and you can judge if you need them or not:

alsa - advanced linux sound architecture
anacron - a cron like command scheduler (don't need cron if you run this)
apmd - advanced power management daemon
atd - at daemon, for handling jobs run with the at command (I doubt you use this)
crond - cron daemon, for scheduling commands (don't need anacron if you run this)
devfsd - manages entries in the /dev filesystem. I wouldn't kill this.
gpm - general purpose mouse interface
harddrake - mandrake's hard drive utility. I think this only runs once at boot.
internet - establishes your connection to the internet... just runs once at boot.
keytable - loads the appropriate keymap in the system.. also only runs once at boot.
kheader - does some kernel header checking... just runs once.
medusa - utility to help speed up filesystem searches. I'd kill this one.
netfs - mounts and unmounts all network filesystems. Just runs once.
network - self explainatory. Keep this one
partmon - partition monitor... check to see if you are running low on space. Can probably kill this one.
pcmcia - keep this if you have any pcmcia devices
portmap - handles port mapping... keep this one.
random - provides higher quality random number generation. doubt you need this one.
rawdevices - support for raw devices. doubt you need this.
sound - starts the sound subsystem.
syslog - system logger. keep this one.
usb - handles usb devices.
xfs - x font server.. DONT KILL THIS!
xinetd - controls connections to your machine (local as well as remote). probably want to keep this.

This howto is geared towards saving battery life on a laptop, which ofcourse can't be a bad thing. But it also explains how to disable a lot of processes which you might not use which could also speed up your system.

http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/mini/Battery-Powered.html