I was running (or should I say dragging along) RH7.3 on a 400MHZ box w/128 MB RAM...I upgraded to RH9.0 on a 2.2GHZ w/512 MB RAM....and life was sweet once again....every Friday I do the same backup procedures and have never taken a 'serious' performance hit as I have now...I feel like I'm back to RH7.3 days...below is a list of the tasks I perform for backing up...

Update A/V
Double check firewall (Guarddog) settings
Delete browser cache
Empty trash and temp files
Backup my "/" partition (if I've added any new programs)
Backup mail folder
Backup contacts
Changed background and screensaver

When RH9.0 was running fine the 'top' command would show that I had 512MB of RAM and that I was using 504MB (approx) so I had about 7-8MB free...ok I could live with that...everything was popping open at the blink of an eye....now the 'top' command is telling me that I'm only using 150MB and that I have 360MB (approx) free. So I essentially have more RAM free but have taken a hit on performance....???

NOTE:
I'm running KDE3 interface but now 'top command' shows only X...I know KDE takes alot of RAM to run...so is it possible that somehow I switch my gui from KDE3 to X, and while X takes less resources its slower than KDE3...???...possible? With the info provided I sure appreciate your thoughts....thanks in advance.

I have seen this phenomenon a few times with newer motherboards as you seem to have. The first thing to check is that the disks have the parameters set right. I have often found that the DMA is switched off. Do

hdparm /dev/hda

or whatever your system disk is and see if using_dma is on. If it's off, try

hdparm -d 1 /dev/hda

and see if you get errors, such as "Operation not permitted".

At boot time, that behavior is controlled by a file /etc/sysconfig/harddisks. The kernel normally reads DMA capability and some other features from the BIOS, but I find that with newer MoBos this is broken somehow, so I had to force values in that file.

Hope it helps,

mlp