[ILUG] slow response from kde apps

[Declan Grady]

Hi,
On a Pentium2-400MHz dell laptop with 256MB ram, and a few hundred megs of 
free disk space, I am using debain 3.0, with a 2.4.22 kernel, and kde3.

My apps seem to run quite slowly - things like Kmail, mozilla-firefox, even 
Konqueror takes a while starting up.

I've been living with this, as just having an old laptop, but when I see the 
same laptop running doze98, it flys along by comparison, with 
lookout-express, and the dreaded ms-ie6.

I was running iwth 128 RAM and chnaged to 256 thinking it would help, but 
doesnt seem to have made any difference.

Being a perpetual linux newbie, I dont really know where to start looking for 
things that are slowing it down.
I dor get an error at kde startup saying "could not start kdeinit" since I 
upgraded to kde3 (using apt-get), but clicking OK lets kde startup as normal 
- I dont suspect this as a cause of slowness. 

Any suggestions (apart from the obvious "buy a new laptop") ?

Thanks
Declan