My home computer is terribly slow running KDE.  I didn't notice this 
until I compared with a similar machine at work which is much faster.  I 
assumed at first that the AMD chips was just slower 500 K-6 VS 450 PII. 
 Well, I just tested a 200 Mhz Pentium machine at work with KDE and it 
also beats my machine at home (both with Slack 8)!  Anyone have any tips 
on diagnostics that I can use to figure out what the hell is going on? 
 The only real difference that could account for my poor performance on 
my home box is IDE VS SCSI.

Home box (custom) AMD K-6 500Mhz
SiS530 intergrated graphics
192MB RAM
256MB swap

I even compiled KDE from source, without much effect, but it did speed 
up a *little*.  On the plus side, I'm much more impressed with how fast 
Linux runs when it's set up right.