[newbie] Memory Question

[surya]

I have ML7.2 installed on my machine. I have about 128MB of RAM. After I log in 
if I see the mem occupancy using either Hard Drake or xsysinfo or one of the 
other X-utils, I see that only about 4-12 Megs appear to be free. Consequently 
the machine is horribly slow.

Agreed that I am doing this on an old Cyrix 6X86 200MHz processor. But I still 
feel that 128 Megs ought to make the machine atleast launch an X-term quickly. 

Any idea why the machine is this slow?

Thanks in advance
Surya