So by compile you mean "make" and "make install?".. I'm kinda new at this lol

Hmm I played it with -nocache and it ran well until I opened up Mozilla, then it said something about "broken pipe"

"No bind found for key MOUSE_BTN0 4% 10.6% 49 0 0%
Broken pipe 81.2 A-V: -0.012 ct: -0.155 2425/1940 12% 4% 12.1% 78 0 0%"

dunno if that has anything to do with anything... but thereafter it was jerky again :(

Probably killed your cache, but yeah it's make make install thing, like this though:

./configure --with-runtime-cpudetection
make
make install

But you can find more options with:
./configure --help

And then go from there.

Cool

Don't worry about the message stating that your machine is too slow, mine does that too and shouldn't affect it.

Also to add, Mozilla is a resource hog itself. Can you run like top and see how much memory/swap is being used ? Not sure if that would have any affect but it is strange how it was running good there for a moment til you opened up Mozilla.

looking at the error again, it said that that could be a possible reason, not necessarily what is wrong with it. Which utility should I use to check the resource consumption?

Just type top and it should start the display of all processes running and your memory and swap usage. Hit q to quit.

Oh and just noticed, when you ran that command for hdparm, you tried to specify your cdrom ?? You can't run that command (that I know of or its new to me) for you cdrom or dvd player, that's why you got errors.

Try this command:

hdparm -d1 /dev/hdX

Where the X in hd is your particular hard drive. Most likely if its the primary IDE, it would be hda. So it would read like this:

hdparm -d1 /dev/hda

And see if that does any better at getting rid of the jerkiness and lag.

k, I ran that and noticed the moment CPU usage went over %16, the jerkyness started heavily. Just moving the mouse boosted me up 6 or 7 percent, so mozilla definitely put me over that figure. Still mystified about this whole thing... I could run like 10 apps and play a dvd on winblows2kpro with no problems.

That command hdparm -d1 /dev/hda helped a bit... noticed it didn't jerk out as easily.. but after moving the mouse around and switching to mozilla it instantly started

I Re-Read the mplayer FAQ and Docs, you should be able to set the hdparm for your cdrom.. but try the actual device instead of the symlink, and also make sure your logged in as root for access with the hdparm command.

But something is definitely wrong. With your system you shouldn't have any problems running several apps and playing dvd's.
Yours is better than mine and I've had anywhere to 10 to 15 Galeon windows opened, evolution running, mplayer going with Gaim, several terminals going while compiling an app.. with no problems.

I would try that hdparm command again and also try the cache option when running the movie again.

Do you have any other browsers installed, like Galeon. Galeon is much lighter on resources. Might want to try that out but go ahead and test it with the cache option and also try with the video option of -vo x11 and see what happens, without opening mozilla.

How big is your swap and how much of the memory was being used ??

I have a 1024 mb swap, and while I was running it, 414 mbs of phys ram was being used out of 512 .. seems like a shitload. I noticed the slowdown started when the dvd stopped spinning.. then when it started respinning it was jerky.

Don't worry about the RAM amount, that's normal in Linux.

Well, is this the same DVD you had while using Windows ? Seems like it could be a hardware related issue with that last description. Did you try running that hdparm for the dvd device again as root and using the actual device name like /dev/hdc or something along those lines. I know you did with your hard drive, but maybe try with the dvd drive.

Well, my eyes are watery and burning from staring at this screen for too long... time to go to bed. Hopefully we can get you fixed up soon. Acid should see this thread here soon, maybe he can give us some insight on it.

I'll try to keep working on it, thanks much for your help :)