Walking speed or crawling!
 

I have installed Zenwalk 3.0 and was first impressed by two things.
First, that my monitor screen size was correct, give or take a millimetre or so, on a 21 inch monitor WITHOUT any setup!
Second, that the sound worked straight away (/dev/dsp being present - it's missing on most distributions!).

First impressions don't last though.

I installed Vexira antivirus and scanned my Windows C: drive (4 Gb). It took an amazing 41 minutes 42 seconds to complete the scan.
That is REALLY SLOW. For comparison, I did the same scan using Slax Popcorn (running from harddisk, not CD) - vexira completed the task in 12 minutes 43 seconds.

Later, I compiled a few source packages and I noticed how slow the compiling speed was.

Zenwalk is nice, but surely it shouldn't be this slow!
Has any one else had these speed problems?

550 Mhz Celeron, 256Mb RAM, VIA chipset mainboard, Trident Cyberblade video (built-in)

First thing you might want to check:

see if DMA is enabled:
(run as root), replace xxx with your root harddisk

the other thing you might want to check is to see if any processes have run away on your by running top and watching for a while.

Actually, with a few days more experience, I realise that I have unfairly criticised Zenwalk. It isn't slow - in fact it is quite speedy!

The Terminal is slow!!!

Which terminal is in use is confusing - is it "xterm" or Zenwalk's own creation?
I have looked at the man page for xterm, and wow! What a page! I don't really have a couple of hours free to study it all. Perhaps someone could point out the possible speed increasing switches. (OK, I'm lazy)

Whatever, the default settings of the terminal is one area in which Zenwalk's producers should look into, as it spoils an otherwise excellent product.

it isn't xterm, it's Terminal.
For more infos clik on help>(content|about) (or in web browser):
file:///usr/share/doc/Terminal//C/index.html

In most of case it seems a good choice, if you have better softs/ideas, please tell us... :)

All the bells and whistles of Terminal don't impress me. Thank God "xterm" is also available! It is over 300 per cent faster. I have now changed my xfce panel and menu links to "xterm" and the same antivirus scan mentioned above completes in 13 minutes.

This reminds me of a Russian proverb about a bald man being given a comb.
Terminal is more akin to a bald man being given a comb, a hair dryer and a set of curling-tongs!