RedHat not too speedy...
 

I have just installed RedHat Linux 9 and I am not too pleased. It takes about 2 minutes to open OpenOffice Writer (not exaggerating) and everything else is just...painfully...slow...

I am dual booting with Windows 98 (don't tell me thats the problem because it was just as slow without the dual boot), and I am running a Compaq Aramda 1750 laptop with a 6.2G hard drive, 128MB RAM.

Is this something I will just have to put up with?

OpenOffice is no speed demon, that's for sure.
You may want to look into optimizing you configuration by turning off services you won't use (ie: apache). There are a few threads floating around here regarding this topic.

I'm using an 800MHz Via C3 (like a K6-II core) micro-ITX board with 256M and the only time I'll say it's slow is when I'm compiling, doing some gimp rendering, or encoding video. It's a great little workstation.