I don't mean to be long-winded, I just want to know if anybody had found any 
tricks that makes a noticable difference in the speed of linux

I am looking for any way to speed up linux.  I have upgraded to the 2.4 
kernel, and boot time takes less time.  Great.  If it improves the speed (and 
smoothness) of programs in run-time, those hard drives are holding them back. 
 So, I checked out some old PLUG mail and found stuff about the hdparm 
utility (from "linux too slow") and I gave that a shot.  I found out that my 
drives were already running in 32-bit mode - because the benchmark tests 
yielded the same results.  I used "hdparm -Tt /dev/hda" to test the drive.  
Then, I did a "hdparm -c3d1 /dev/hda".  This said that 32-bit dma was 
activated.  Then I did hte hdparm -Tt /dev/hda again and the results were the 
same.  I have 400 MB ram and two swap partitions totalling 267,544 MB, and 
the swap is hardly ever used (using "free" and "kpm" (KDE Process Manager)).
I tried to upgrade to XFree86 4.0.2, but the compilation forced out a kernel 
bug in inode.c and that is too scary to try again (since inode.c is part of 
the file management system) - and a crash that forced me to reformat a 
partition.

-- 
Rick Rosinski
http://rickrosinski.com
rick@rickrosinski.com