12+ hour install --___ ZZZzzzz

[Chromatic Distortion]

yeah, it keeps locking up. (but after sitting it for awhile, i got it installed {after 5 hours!})

But that's not why it's slow. Whenever it's accessing its hard drive, it's slower than my other one with an old i133 processor. (Well, almost) Once anything is loaded into RAM, it runs a great deal fast and smooth. It's just getting the stuff from the HD to RAM that's the problem. Is DMA disabled, or something? When I booted up, I saw a message that said something like 'driver may be hogging interrupts' How do I change my IRQs? I'm getting a few other live iso images to see if this is just distro-specific, but it takes windows forever, too.

Any tips at all on how I may speed up my HD I/O?

[budman7]

In my BIOS I can change which IRQ's are assigned to what.
If your BIOS has the ability to assign IRQ's, if I were you I would read up on which IRQ is necessary for which function.
For instance, IRQ 0 is used by the system timer, and changing that could have disastrous effects on your computer.

[l8forwork]

I been play'n with computers sence trs80 model 1. But only been messing with unix,linux about a year. I just set up dual boot style a NEW BOX amd3200 opit windows and fedora2, loaded the kitchen sink in both, 2 1/2 hours for both total time.
Now my guess on your problem. You got a hardware problem! Bad ide cable or drive. Or more than one drive on same cable and jumpers set wrong, sometimes they still work but fight the controler.
NOW the best guess is memory stick not compatable with new mother board. new boards are pickie.
Best test swap this stuff out one at a time. My other try might be-- pull the ide cable from motherboard, pop in a dos boot disk floppy, and if that booger don't boot to dos promt in 10 seconds you got a motheboard problem (memory my guess)

[Chromatic Distortion]

Well, it definately has something to do with the drive. I spent all day fine tuning-it to squeeze all I could out of it. Actually, I haven't even opened the box yet (package, actually, it's a laptop). It was put together at some assembley place (optimized for windows of course ), so I'm not sure exactly how they put it together.