Can recompiling your kernel lead to speed improvements

[James McDonald]

I have an AMD Athlon(tm) Processor CPU and am running Ubuntu  2.6.17-10-386.

Can I expect performance gains if I recompile the kernel specifically 
for the AMD processor... I just read a Ubuntu thread that had a bunch of 
people that say it makes *no* difference. 
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=24853

My thinking is if you are compiling on you own machine and have the 
correct optimization shouldn't that give slight improvement?

And while I'm at it
<rant>
I'm gaining frustration with some of the more adminish tasks I could do 
with ease under FC* and am now finding difficult under Ubuntu...

Setting global environment vars? edit /etc/environment ... Hmm well i 
can't get a simple ~/bin into the path using that method...

Getting my ADSL connection to automatically bring itself back up... Hmm 
well pppoeconf doesn't seem to have the option...

But with Ubuntu there is always a legion of users who will tell you that 
you just click on this , that the other and then... Well guess what, I 
want it to run headless and not be effected by a user logoff ...

I am so tempted to begin the task of moving absolutely everything off 
this box so I can blow it away and put a mature distribution on it...
</rant>