[TriLUG] mandrake performance?

[Jim Priest]

Installed Mandrake 9.1 last night on my box - blew away Win2000. It was time for a re-install anyway so I figure I'd give Mandrake a try after inquiring on here (quite a while ago) about friendly distros.

It's an older box - 850mhz, Celeron PIII - 256mb RAM.  I did just a basic install - no web, firewall, etc.  Just Gnome, KDE and the basic office/web apps.  It seems REALLY slow opening up something like Galeon or Mozilla takes 10-15 seconds, sometimes longer - and I'm wondering whats the best thing to throw at it to speed it up?  I'm mostly used Linux on the server end and haven't messed much with it on the desktop so I'm not sure whats the best thing to do in order to improve performance?  Ram? Swap space? 

If I can speed it up I think I could leave it on there and move to Linux at home - I'm really impressed with the progress of Gnome/KDE!

Thanks,
jim