Xubuntu 7.10 running slow

[kazoo]

I'm a first-time Linux user

My computer is a 7 yr old Toshiba Satellite laptop with:
Celeron processor 646 MHz
192 MB RAM (came w/ 64 and we added 128 - can go to 320 total)
HD size 6 GB
S3 Savage IX video driver w/ 8 MB integrated video memory

Here's what I've done so far:

This machine had Windows XP on it. I went to the Ubuntu site and chose Xubuntu because it said it could run on 128 MB RAM. I made a LiveCD, tested it out, and tried to install 3x from it, w/out success. Then I read that you should install from the alternate CD, which worked. I had it partion the entire drive (so no Windows anymore), and I had it choose the swap size (since I didn't know what to pick).

Things seem very slow, however -- way slower than with XP, which seemed odd. It takes 5 mins from power up to get to the login screen. It takes 1.5 mins to get from there to the desktop. It takes 1 min for Firefox to open. I went to a website that has a PacMan game in Flash and tried to play it, but it was extremely slow.

A Google search revealed that people seemed to be having trouble with that video card and Linux. I opened a terminal and typed "glxinfo|grep render" and it said "direct rendering: No" and "OpenGL renderer string: Mesa GLX Indirect". I wasn't sure what to do about that. I also found some people saying they made the following additions to their xorg.conf file, under the "Device" section, which I did:

Option "UseFBDev" "false"
Option "BusType" "PCI"
Option "DmaMode" "None"

I also deleted the last line in the file (not including "EndSection"), something about a Tablet, which I don't have, which these other people said they had also deleted.

I did find a Linux driver from the video card manufacturer:
(S3 Graphics Co., Ltd.)
-- should I try to install this? Or will I really foul things up? Any other thoughts on what I could do to speed things up? Thanks for reading.