I don't think Knoppix sets DMA for the drives on by default, this might help (use something like: hdparm -d1 /dev/hdx ) - I agree tho' KDE is a bit slow.

Whilst I'm thinking about it, the 'find file' is REALLY slow on my machine, is this because I have a few partitions incl. FAT32 or is it just KDE.....

Stu.....