HELP!!! -slow fedora

[flgm]

Hi!
I need help with fedora core 3 test 3.

I've installed this system because with the stable 2 release i had some hardware issues. After installing the 3 test theese problems seemd to be solved but i've found new ones!

1. It's really slow. My machine is a
Athlon XP 2800+ (Tbred 2266 Mhz)
Asus A7n8x-x
1 Gig Apacer Pc333
Maxtor 9 Plus (8 mb cashe) 120 GB

The problem is, that when i run some apps (emule, xmms) my proc is around 50% but fedora reacts REALLY slowly! For example if i open some applications, even if i open the main menu my harddisk starts to seek continously and it takes approx 30 seconds to open the main menu or the app. Mostly in theese cases i have Gnome panel crashes.. with error panel i s allredy running.. The worst is when i want tu run firefox.. Sometimes it needs 1 minute to open.

2.
My hdd speed is noticeably slow.. If i copy something, forexample 100 Mb from one partition to other it takes one minute..

I've tested my hdd with hdparm -t /dev/hda and it showd 64 MB/s result. So i think it should be ok!
What can cause the problem?

Thanks for all! any help needed!
please reply to my email too! : benkeszabolcs@atlas.sk

ps: Sorry for my english!

Have you updated your system via up2date or yum? There have been a lot of updates since the initial release.

You should also use the top command to see which programs are using what. You could also use the strace command to do some lower level debuging.

[flgm]

i'm updating every day! i'm using up2date and installing apps with yum!
can you discribe thoose commands? I'm a newbie with linux!
Thanx

[jcstille]

Check all of your processes with:

ps -A -H

Just give th command top

top

and find which processes are eating you lunch.

The strace command is a lot more advanced. If you are interested read the man pages

man strace