I am new to Linux, and am frustrated by the speed (or lack of it) of my RH9 installation. It takes forever to open apps, and things like spell checking take up to a minute to load. A look at the system monitor shows that I am using less than 10% of the CPU at max, and .99% at "idle". My mem usage is, however, at 99%. Will more Ram solve the problem? Also, why are there 4 copies of the mingetty program running at once, and when I try to end one of them, the system monitor freezes and I must end it. ANy help would be much appreciated.

More ram is always a good idea, I've never found an upper limit. Apps can take longer to load on linux than windows because windows includes parts of the apps in the os, which is why windows takes longer to load on boot, (and is prone to crash, etc.). But there are lots of other reasons as well, many in the linux world fine tune their systems and can make them run much faster than their windows equlivent, but out of the box linux distros are not tuned so.

The mingetty thing is fine, theres one for each "un-logged in" console. Your ram seems to be a concern. Its true that GTK2/Gnome is bloated and requires a lot of ram. Are you sure you have a good amount of swap space? Ideal is around 250MB according to your ram. You can switch to something like fluxbox or windowmaker if you want speed. Gnome takes too much recources. KDE 3.1 works great on my P4 w/ 512MB of ram. Very fast...

122mb of ram is like the bare minimum amount of ram required to run the gui.

Learn the command line interface - ctr+shift+<f1-f6> - you will be much happier once you do.

I agree that getting more RAM will certainly help the most but you could also make sure hard drive access is optimized too (CAUTION IT COULD CAUSE FREEZES OR DATALOSS). Take a look at this article for some tips on optimizing the harddrive... or if that's too involved just see if you can safely turn DMA support on if it's not already.

Yes, I believe 128 meg is the recommended MINIMUM amount of memory for a gui installation, so upping to at least 256 would be quite helpful, but in the meantime you can free up memory by removing virtual terminals and unloading unnecessary daemons (services). First, modify the /etc/inittab file and remove these lines: 4:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty4 5:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty5 6:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty6 Dan's advice then becomes ctr+shift+<f1-f3>, instead (f4 becomes first X environment.) Next, load "ntsysv" or "redhat-config-services (for a gui version) and uncheck all unnecessary services. Here are the ones I have checked: keytable network random syslog xfs Finally, reboot. As per gmoney's advice, to enable DMA access for your hard disk, enter this line (at a command prompt): # hdparm -d1 /dev/hda (hda is primary master, hdb primary slave, hdc secondary master, etc.) Before doing this, enter "hdparm /dev/hda" and see if "using_dma" is already set to on. Good luck.