Slow System

[ewolfe involved com (Ed Wolfe)]

I accomplished the most amazing thing today, I actually 
dialed into to my ISP and got connected. 

Now, I've got a problem.

One reason I wanted to become a Linux user was that a friend 
of mine said that it's more stable, faster, is a true
multi-task OS and it can put all of your RAM to use, unlike
Win95.

When I was running Communicator a while ago, it was painfully
slow. Just trying to delete a message would take about
20 seconds. Then reading the next one in line took forever
too. Just a 1k message said "98% read (stalled)", and then 
another 15 seconds and it finished loading.

I didn't have the colored graph thing going, but I had the fvwm buttons
on the bottom right hand visible and the box on the left which looks
like it charts system resource usage was completely filled up and
frequently spiking and filling in above the black line.

I reset X to only use 16bit graphics instead of 24 bits and that
didn't help.

Another thing that happened a few times is I would end up suddenly
being at another section of the desktop, as if I had clicked on
a blank square in that thing in the bottom right corner. 

Once, XWin just shut down and I was back in a shell. It restarted
just fine, until I started Communicator again.

I've got a 5X86 board. 133mhz, 20MB RAM, 20MB Swap partition,
at least 150MB free disk space.

Could it be that I don't have a /home partition or directory?
I think all of my programs, system files and everything
are in /root.

I hope this is fixable. If someone had just set this up, said, "Here's
Linux," and left, I'd be wanting my Win95 back. But I've got too many
months invested in this to just give up now.

Anyone familiar with a problem like this?

Ed