Give this a go:

Just in case your distro isn't pretweaked enough.

Linux users looking for something to help speed up their systems may want to consider Powertweak Linux, a free system optimization tool.

The tool runs as a daemon in the background on a Linux machine and can be used to tune CPU performance by modifying the configuration registers in a Linux system. The program also can be used to adjust CDROM drive speeds, optimize file system performance using " /proc/sys " entries and change power management settings by interacting with hard drive " sleep " settings, similar to the use of the " hdparm " command.
Download: Powertweak Linux

Also be sure to read this related article:
Check it out

How big is your swap? Do you even have a swap? Are your hard drives running in PIO or DMA mode?

I have Xandros running on a PIII 1.0GHZ with 512MB ram and it works jim dandy.

Also try checking your hard disk speed:

"hdparm -tT /dev/hdx " on whatever drive is / . If its really slow it may account for slow loading. This might be fixed by playing with hdparm but I won't go into it until we have some more info.


Go into a console and run the following:

"hdparm -tT /dev/hdX " on whatever drive X is / (hda, hdc, etc.)

That should fix it.

And speaking of swap *above*, try tweaking your "swappiness"

http://kerneltrap.org/node/3000

You can add
---------------------------------
vm.swappiness=10
to the /etc/sysctl.conf file.

Also try a other I/O schedular like cfq.
You can change the schedular by adding a line

-----------------------------------------------------
elevator=cfq
to the grub.conf