Thanks for the tips on Fedora performance. I just did a test install on a desktop system to compare it to my laptop and Core 3, test 2 works just fine on the desktop system. Disk performance is about what I'd expect without me having to fiddle with hdparm settings. Before I installed Fedora on this laptop, I had problems reading a gzip'd tar file that was in my home directory on the Gentoo install that I replaced. Though I re-partitioned the linux part of the drive (XP is on another partition) during the Fedora install, I'm wondering if the file corruption and my current performance issues are related. I'll also check the configuration differences between the desktop and the laptop to see if there is some clue there. Glenn