choad, that is COMPLETELY uncalled for, and COMPLETELY against the rules, I have warned you and reported this post to Jeremy, please refrain from similar posting in the future, it is unwelcome and will not be tolerated.

If you look at the question, the person asking was not directing the question towards you anyway, and even if they were, they are here to help you, and you retort in such a manner?

Sorry, I am really DRUNK, I got fired today and decided to drink a 5th of Vodka, my bad, I know that isn't called for, please everyone forgive me. it won't happen again...

I'm sorry to hear that, please, for your own good then, take my advice and set the bottle down and do something away from the computer. Head outside and do some yard work, work on the car, watch a movie. Do something that when you sober up, you won't look back and say "too bad I can't undo that".

Cool

Weird.... I personally (see specs in signature) have no problems with speed. OpenOffice opens in a matter of seconds, and even copying large files or watching a 700MB divx movie is a breeze. Any chance that something like SMP or APIC is causing a slowdown? My first advice would be to check through the logs. You might find some answers there. Linux is not supposed to be slow. In fact, with a little knowledge and a little work, you can get linux running on a machine that would puke it's guts out if you tried to install WinXP on it.

slight

Choad God,

Settle down, thats for me. I have a compaq armada e500 pentium III 700, 128 mb ram. 12 mb hd.

rmaynard

what'd he say.. was it deleted?

rmaynard,

Have you turned off unneeded services? They will slooww the system down. What services do you have running?

Sorry to hear about your problems. I have no hard feelings. I mean they deleted whatever was bad. Somebody says something real bad about me and I don't even get to read it

I do appreciate the moderators. They do an excellant job!

I turned off a bunch of services and tried it again last night. This certainly seemed to help, but it still seems sluggish to me compared to any of the windows OS's and mac OS's I have used in the past (even on really slow machines). For example, now OpenOffice loaded in 27 seconds (down from 53) to open up a terminal window, it took about 3 seconds.

Any other suggestions? I read in another thread that Red Hat 9.0 does not have this sluggishness. Has this been verified? If so, I will trash Mandrake and go Red Hat, otherwise, I may save my dough and go back to windows!

I have never tried Mandrake so cannot comment on it.

Try doing a
ps aux
and see if eating up processor time and memory

hi

cut down the unneeded sevices
uninstall software that you dont use
use konqueror or galeon instead of mozilla
increase memory used by openoffice in option>memory to 20 mb instead of the default 8
use a lightweight window manager like xfce or fluxbox instead of kde or gnome if you want sheer speed

hope that helped

You have a very similar problem to the one I had. I solved it by buying a brand spanking new 7200 rpm hard-drive(dual boot with XP, btw). Runs like a dream now, maybe a *touch* slower than windows, but not so you'd notice without a stopwatch.

If it's anything to do with your HD, run a program twice and see if the speed of loading is drastically improved the second time around. (ie, it's booting from the memory cache the second time and not from your HD).

Hope my experiences can be of some help!!!

(Edited) I wouldn't know if it's Mandrake being slow, as I've only tried Mandrake and Knoppix - but if I can cope on an AMD Athlon 1700 XP, then I'm sure your machine should kick mine's a*s...

(Further edited) Sorry to hear about your job dude. Life sucks (Gods know)!!!!

From my personal experience, i'd say the whole problem is dependent on your windows manager(may be some hardware settings, but not really sure of that!). Dude get the "Icewm" from their website(<www.icewm.org>..i guess). You could either download the source code (icewm-version.tar.gz) or the rpm. I had downloaded the source code and compiled it.
now a few tips on installing the source file(if thts what you are doing)
1. copy the downloaded file to /tmp/ (hope u know the command)
2. $>tar xzf icew.....tar.gz
3. now change directory to the newly created icewm directory
$>cd icewm-1.version...
4. $> ./configure (mite take a while... go for a walk now...)
5. $> make (wud be even longer......)
5, $> make install
Ideally icewm shud be installed in your system now. btw you mite need to log in as root to install.
continuing....hope that you know how to switch desktop managers... if not run $>switchdesk wud show the options. Otherwise if you wanna make icewm your default desktop, be patient n' do the following steps ....yaaawn.... nah.. its quite simple...
1. You might find a file ".Xcleints-default" in your homedirectory. if not create one..
2. If your default wm is gnome or kde you will find a line like
"exec gnome". now change it as "exec icewm". That shud do the trick.
Now you could change your theme to your liking. You mite have some difficulty with your default theme. if so do the following otherwise forget it....
1. Your home directory shud have a directory ".icewm" if not make one... (psst..use mkdir...
2. Now find the location of your icewm installation.
"$>find /usr -name ice* -print" .... assuming its somewhere under /usr.
3. Go inside the /icewm.(its /usr/local/share/icewm for me) You would ideally find a file calles "preferences". Now copy this file to your .icewm in your home "$>cp ./preferences ~/.icewm/"
4. Now edit the line "theme = /usr...../icewm/theme/your_theme." It mite not be exactly theme, but you get the picture,eh?
btw these are the things which worked fine for me on my rh8. i do really understand your frustations having been myself on the linux learning curve.. still learning though...
btw if you are deciding to download the "rpm" version.. Jus' run the command "$> rpm -ivh icewm -......rpm" . heard that there cud b some dependency problems in this case.. anyway good luck n' take it easy....
cheers,
me

hdparm is a nice app to speed up your hard disk access speed.

Here's a nice O'Reilly article describing its usage and benefits.

However, I think I can write a better one... Hmm, someday (soon) I probably will

It's wrong to say that "Linux is slow". I have Gentoo Linux installed on a 450 mhz with 192 mb ram. I run gnome, and it's not slow. If you have dhcp, set a hostname. If Apache, Postfix, or some other unneeded server is running, shut it down. Also make sure dma is enabled for your hd.