Slow redrawing

[Quang]

Problem: Linux redraws windows very slowly in my pc. When I move a window rapidly the CPU usage explodes. If I do this while listening music the song will sound choppy (like listening a CD in a Jeep)

My machine:

AMD Duron 1200+ Spitfire (900 MHz)
256MB RAM
Video adapter: SiS 630/730 series

I had the same problem with the following distros:

Red Hat 9.0, Mandrake 10, Mandrake 10.1, Ubuntu 6.06.1, Gentoo 2006.1, VectorLinux 5.1.1 and SUSE 10.1 (and FreeBSD 6.1)

The video adapter is always installed correctly by the OS, and with SUSE (my current distro) I can even enable 3D acceleration.

I know is not the best pc out there, but I don't have this problem with Windows XP.

Here are some snaps taken from VectorLinux (which is supposed to be a light distro)

Idle (http://i93.photobucket.com/albums/l58/Quang99/vectorlinuxidle.gif)
Moving a window (http://i93.photobucket.com/albums/l58/Quang99/vectorlinuxmoving.gif)

Any way to fix this without doing some serious hacking like recompiling the kernel?

[cybertron]

Well, I see there's a 2d acceleration option for X. You might want to look in Suse's display configuration and make sure that isn't turned off. Also the Render option, which I think would show up in the same place. Of course make sure that it's actually using the sis driver and not something generic like vesa, although since Suse wants to turn on 3d acceleration I would think it's using the right one.

There's also the possibility that the sis driver for Linux just isn't as good as the one for Windows and isn't being properly used, but hopefully there's another answer.