How Can I Improve Linux Speed

[Donald_Sass gov nt ca]

In order to acquire some self education and to experiment with Linux, I 
loaded the Gnome 2.0  Fedora Linux release onto an old 200Mhz 64K 
laptop. The laptop previously had Windows 2K installed.

The laptop performed reasonably using W2k and it was an acceptable 
machine for small applications (spreadsheet, word processing, etc). The 
Fedora Linux O/S is very slow, it is unusable for any application.  

Is there something wrong, should Fedora be as fast as W2K?

Thanks for any help.

Please reply by email to donald_sass gov nt ca