Joe,

You may want to make note of what kernel the system is running.  
Checking with cat /proc/version will tell you if it's a 2.4 or a 2.6 
kernel.  The 2.6 series implemented volumous amounts of internal 
reconstruction that resulted in overall better performance in the x86 
field (486, pentiums, athlons, etc), and probably on others.  I haven't 
tried Mandriva 2006 yet so I don't know if there is some sort of utility 
on the desktop that allows tweaking of kernel parameters to take place.  
I've seen this in SuSe (one of the scant few things that they managed to 
implement that's actually worth it) so you may want to look around for a 
kernel tweak UI that could improve performance.  Maybe someone else on 
here knows about it.

Also, having double the amount of swap isn't always a good thing.  
Generally, it is better to match the amount of ram so that swap doesn't 
'fill up' since the system is now thinking "okay, I've got [..] this 
much room to actually work with and [....] this much of a buffer space 
to mirror it to", so to speak.  The vmstat command can clue you in more 
on this, along with top.

-Scott

joe wrote:

> 
>The new Mandriva 2006 install I just finished is painfully slow in some 
>applications, particularly Firefox, Konqueror, and Kmail ... much slower 
>than my old Mandrake 8.1 system.  I have 512 Meg of Ram and 1 Gig of swap 
>and nothing else running while I do these operations one at a time.  What 
>would be the recommended procedure to try to investigate and remedy this 
>problem?  
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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