Slow performance on Thinkpad (RH9)

[dep]

quoth Susan Macchia:

| So I was wondering if anyone has any ideas why this is happening. 
| Could it be the use of 1 big partition?  Did I not allocate enough
| swap (although, when I look at memory, during these periods, at least
| half is free).
|
| Or am I expecting more from this machine than it can deliver?  But if
| that is the case, why, when running RH8, did X-Windows start up
| fairly quickly, while now it is slow...

some things to check: are there processes running that are using up more 
memory than you figured? i don't know what redhat's current default 
configuration is, but they used to turn just about everything on, which 
made a kind of mess. has the machine a cd reader? if so, it might be 
useful to boot from something like a live knoppix cd and see if you're 
getting the same kind of performance hits.
-- 
dep

History doesn't move in a straight line, and irony is a dialectical 
hairpin. -- Christopher Hitchens