Speeding up a machine

[Billy Crook]

I'd like to think I have a decent system.  (2.33GHz Core2Duo, 4 Gigs DDR667,
7200RPM SATA drive, nVid Quadro FX2500)  I show it to people sometimes when
they gripe about the brand new computer they bought that doesn't work
because it came preinfected with Vista.  For the most part,  my system
ROCKS!  But sometimes, it can just be slow on some things.  It takes about
two minutes to do a full restart.  I've set grub's delay to 1 second, and
configured the bios for "fast boot" and skip memory check.  Still, I'd like
to make it faster.  I can run a lean windows 2000 box, and have at work for
a long time.  On it, I could reboot in less than a minute, and its hardware
wasn't half what I have now.  I am less skilled with Linux than I am with
Windows, but I'd like to change that.

I've looked around the web for ways to optimize your Linux system.  hdparm
was mentioned a lot, but my drive is sata, and my cdrom is set to be
recognised as scsi because as IDE, its throughput was too jerky to watch
DVDs.  When I tried to turn on DMA, hdparm kept throwing a fit about
"HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device".  sdparm doesn't seem
to offer the same.  For example, I wand to use 32-bit transfer mode with
sync,  hdparm won't cooperate, and sdparm doesn't know what I'm talking
about.

My system is fast enough for me.  I'm OK with waiting 6 seconds for FireFox
to load the first time, 9 for OpenOffice.org Writer, and 2 each subsequent
time, but skeptical windows users cling to any excuse to hate it.

So far, I've trimmed down what services start at boot, I even have VMWare
set not to start automatically, which should shave off a few seconds (No VMs
are configured to start on their own, only the service was.)  I wish the
stuff that starts up on boot could start up asynchronously, or as
asynchronously as possible.  I'm not holding my breath on that though.
Also, my display flickers every now and then.  It doesn't appear to affect
the applications or the system.  It happens with and without beryl and
vmware running.  I'm using nvidia's latest driver as well.  Any ideas?
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