>You can try adding swap but I doubt it will help much as the disk is so old and slow The hard drive is quite recent and supports up to UDMA2 speeds although I too think that adding swap space won't make a difference.
>Adding another 128MB or 256MB of memory would probably help the most with that system Unfortunately there is no option to upgrade the memory on the system. Also I forgot to mention that it is a 800 MHz system: debian:~# cat /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 vendor_id : Vortex86 SoC cpu family : 5 model : 2 model name : 05/02 stepping : 2 cpu MHz : 800.041 fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no coma_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 1 wp : yes flags : fpu tsc cx8 bogomips : 1600.08 clflush size : 32 cache_alignment : 32 address sizes : 32 bits physical, 32 bits virtual power management: Based on my specs (800 MHz CPU and 128 MB RAM) and [1], I still should be able to operate GNOME and some of the apps. However even opening gedit brings the system to crawl which is so surprising. I will add some swap and see if that makes a difference although I am not counting on it based on my past expereince. [1] http://library.gnome.org/misc/release-notes/2.0/#performance