I have read in so many places about the great reliability of Linux. However I have numerous problems on my Suse system, mainly slow running. Tonight I decided to add 24 fonts to my fonts folder by dragging them from one Konqueror window to another. While they were copying, the clock appeared to freeze and the mouse arrow stopped responding. The Konqueror windows became empty white rectangles and the hard drive was heard working hard all this time... it was nearly an HOUR before the clock came back to normal running and I could interact with the PC again through the mouse and keyboard. However my window buttons had gone awol, none of the icons would start any programs any more, and I had to restart the PC. Now if I was using Windows 98 all this would just be a normal everyday experience, but I thought Linux was supposed to be more reliable. I don't call 566MHz fast in this day and age of 64bit multi-GHz processors, but I expected better than this! Maybe something is using up my CPU resources preventing the OS from running properly? Or is the Celeron CPU simply inadequate? Any suggestions? (Please, no suggestions involving sledgehammers...) Tommy.

This might happen because the GUI consumes all the resources and it still needs more. If this is the problem, you should install an older version of KDE or(I know you won't like this) stop using any GUI. If there is a process that consumes your resources, use the top command to see what's going on. Don't worry:there's nothing you can do with a sledgehammer!

It may be possible that you had some cron jobs running in the background like slocate etc which may affect performance. Also check and disable any services that you don't need running such as postfix, sendmail, mysql etc. As eugensth said, a lightweight GUI like xfce will also help.