how can KDE be made snappier?

[Trevor Smith]

I've been to the "speed up kde" site, and kde is still just sluggish. Athlon 
XP-M 2800+ laptop, 512 meg ram, some sort of ATI Radeon graphics card, all 
the animations and eyecandy for kde turned off, and I can STILL visibly 
witness the repainting of window elements (it's fast, but visible). IMO, a 
window should reappear (when maximizing after hidden, for example) instantly 
and as a single unit.

It takes 2+ seconds to load a konsole window (after it's just been closed).

Also, opening a Konqueror window (just my damn home folder!!) takes MINIMUM a 
full second and you can see the painting of the inner window making things 
flash and such. Sometimes 3+ seconds. This is NOT time to show previews or 
anything like that. No F9 side bar is displayed. On Windows, directories of 
similar size open instantly.

KDE performance section of the control center says minimize memory usage for 
file browsing only (recommended) and  max # of instances preloaded is 3 
(tried it with 0 and 1 as well, same results essentiallly). Also checked 
Always try to have at least one preloaded instance.

FYI:

[root at localhost trevor]# hdparm /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
 multcount    = 16 (on)
 IO_support   =  1 (32-bit)
 unmaskirq    =  0 (off)
 using_dma    =  1 (on)
 keepsettings =  0 (off)
 readonly     =  0 (off)
 readahead    = 256 (on)
 geometry     = 16383/255/63, sectors = 78140160, start = 0
[root at localhost trevor]# hdparm -tT /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
 Timing buffer-cache reads:   516 MB in  2.00 seconds = 257.78 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:   44 MB in  3.08 seconds =  14.28 MB/sec

-- 
Trevor Smith // trevor at haligonian.com
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