Things to look at:
Swap
hdparm (IIRC some good stuff in this very forum by Stephen on this, try a search. Failing that, man hdparm or a google should give you access to a lot of tutorials on it).
Wierd cabling and jumpering.
I just installed Knoppix 3.3 to the HDD and I am now noticing extremely slow HDD access. Back when I just had it on the CD it was fine, I could open HDD windows in Konqueror quickly and such. But now when I tried to do anything having to do with the HDD, like click on one of the HDD icons on my desktop, hit the "Browse" button when I am trying to extract files with Ark or am looking for a place to download files to it takes a good 10 minutes or so for it to come up! This is rediculously unacceptable. If I browse through my HDD using the konsole (ya know, using cd and ls, etc) it goes very smoothly, but any graphical interaction with the HDD takes forever. Now I'm no Linux expert, I'm just using Knoppix to kinda dive into Linux and since I have a lot of extra HDD space I figured I'd just do a dual boot. Any help will be appreciated here, otherwise I will just format the Linux partition and go back to the CD (which I really don't want to do).
Things to look at:
Swap
hdparm (IIRC some good stuff in this very forum by Stephen on this, try a search. Failing that, man hdparm or a google should give you access to a lot of tutorials on it).
Wierd cabling and jumpering.

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