RH 8 slowing my pc down

[Penguin76]

OK, I have searched the forum and this seems to be a frequent and ongoing prob, but so far no one has actually answered the question...
I am running RH 8 and my PC runs slower each time I log on. As of now, it takes almost 30 seconds to load my mozilla window, which used to come up immediately, as in 1 maybe 2 seconds with no wait time. This question has been posted many times, but I haven't seen an answer yet.
I unmounted my cdrom and floppy thinking that was it, no, didn't help.
I went and made sure nothing was running that shouldn't be, I have a very basic system setup for email and surfing the net.
Should I shutdown or restart occasionally like in windows to clear my ram?
I am getting frustrated. Thanks for the help

I am running an athlon 800 with 712 MB ram
I had no probs when I first installed RH but like I said it keeps slowing down upon each login.

[bandwidth_pig]

I don't run RedHat myself, but if that was happening to me I would:

1. psaux | more and see if something is sucking up a lot of CPU time...look at mem usage etc.
2. Take a look at what you are running for Window Manager. I don't have a super powerful machine myself (P4 1.4 Ghz with 382 MB RDRAM) and KDE or Gnome really slow me down. Fluxbox or Blackbox run nice and lean. Don't use much resources at all.
3. Kernel recompile if you haven't already done one.

Could be a problem with that version of RedHat. When I ran 6 and upgraded to whatever they came out with after that, it ran much slower for some reason. Not much help I know, but hope it was some.

[Rickdog]

Try running hdparm -Tt /dev/hda from shell. Then run hdparm -d 1 /dev/hda and run hdparm -Tt /dev/hda again. If you see a noticeable improvement, you may want to set the dma to 1 permanently. I have used it on older drives with no noticeable damage, but use at your own risk.

Use the services utility to disable unneeded services at startup, this can help more than you might think.

Install Galeon, it is a light version of Mozilla and usually loads noticeably quicker than Mozilla fat.

[Penguin76]

Thanks for the help, I appreciate it.

[doublec16]

top or gtop will tell you what is using the most CPU and memory. gtop will show you other stuff like swap space usage as well.