arg need help

[knavely]

im running mandrake 7.2
192 mgb of ram 667 intel p3 processor
10 gig hd

everying had been fine since i installed it around december all of a sudden now when i log in it takes forever for X to start up, and once i finaly get into X it takes for ever to run any aplication..i dont even know if i can back up my work to floppys because i cant seem to get even a terminal open, much less the floppy drive.
I dont really want to reinstall Linux, iv got too much work im right in the middle of, and im just not quite competent enough at the command line to get by.
im freaking out!
any help will be SOOO appriciated.

[knavely]

by the way it all started when i couldnt log out and when i tried ctrl alt backspace the thing just went black so i just turned the power off.

[knavely]

sorry...intel 810 chipset

[X_console]

Check to see if Linux sees all the RAM that you should have.

[knavely]

yea it sees it all

[knavely]

well now its working, and pretty fast, i didnt do anything. I just sort of rode it out?
sort of worrysome, i have no idea what the problem is, its not using any of the swap space, which seems odd, but i do have alot of ram..so maybe it doesnt need to yet?
which might explain why its so fast now, but dying just a second ago?