Hey, That whole athlon performance thing got me onto this. I've got an athlon system, it's usually lightning fast but sometimes it just CRAWLS to a standstill. Yes, when intensive disk IO is going on - unrar and uudecode kill my machine. I've done the hdparm thing, but I really don't know what to look for/at. Anyone want to throw some HDD optimization tips out to the list? Including "Enable this in the kernel" etc. For example, I've got append-"idebus=100" in lilo.conf, but I don't know if that actually DOES anything. -Yaron --