Unusuak Slowness

I found a pentium 3 994mhz and installed SL5.7 through pxe and it worked perfectly. It played video, ran libreoffice 3.4 fast and had decent flash 10.3 youtube performance. Yesterday i found a celeron northwood 2ghz with motherboard and cdrom and upgraded to sl6.1 cleanly from the live cd. For some reason, sl6.1 on the new hardware is slow and unreliable. It can no longer play tv at a watchable speed or do youtube at a reasonable fps. It sometimes stops all activity during an intense task for no reason (disk light stops for half a minute and starts). Should i swap back to sl5.7 and if so should i use the pentium3? I used fedora 13 on a northwood p4 2.4ghz no problem at all. The install of 6.1 was post install portion was also painfully sloww

Please help me. Im totqlly stumped...

Is it a hardware or software issue? All the hardware i found lying around marked for death. The pentium 3 coppermine was surprisingly smooth but i thought the celeron would be much faster?

Celeron is less powerful then Pentium.
What DE do you use?
What says to you utilities like glxgears and glxinfo?
Do you see any errors in dmesg output?
I think this is hardware problem because SL should be running on these hardware without any problems.

The 866mhz overclocked to 994mhz pentium 3 coppermine is more powerful than the 2ghz northwood celeron by a long shot? The p3 can play my tv while the celeron struggles like crazy... Isnt the pentium 3 several generations older though? Doesnt it go coppermine(p3) -->tulatin(p3)-->willamette(p4)-->northwood(p4)?... so the pentium 3 that is 3 generations older is more powerful at half the speed? The only advantage i know of is the p3 has 256kb L2 cache while the celeron has 128kb L2 cache but the celeron has twice the speed. On sl5 and 6 i used gnome. I still have the p3 lying around.

The 866mhz overclocked to 994mhz pentium 3 coppermine is more powerful than the 2ghz northwood celeron by a long shot? The p3 can play my tv while the celeron struggles like crazy... Isnt the pentium 3 several generations older though? Doesnt it go coppermine(p3) -->tulatin(p3)-->willamette(p4)-->northwood(p4)?... so the pentium 3 that is 3 generations older is more powerful at half the speed? The only advantage i know of is the p3 has 256kb L2 cache while the celeron has 128kb L2 cache but the celeron has twice the speed. On sl5 and 6 i used gnome. I still have the p3 lying around.

Naaah, the Northwood P4 Celeron is certainly faster than a P3 (I upgraded from a P3 to a Northwood P4 Celeron in 2004 that's why I'm sure), I suspect a hardware problem, maybe your hard disk has started to die? It could have been triggered by the reinstall which implies quite a lot of disk activity.

Try using a different hard disk, and also run memtest86 for at least 8-12 hours to test the RAM.

The 866mhz overclocked to 994mhz pentium 3 coppermine is more powerful than the 2ghz northwood celeron by a long shot? The p3 can play my tv while the celeron struggles like crazy... Isnt the pentium 3 several generations older though? Doesnt it go coppermine(p3) -->tulatin(p3)-->willamette(p4)-->northwood(p4)?... so the pentium 3 that is 3 generations older is more powerful at half the speed? The only advantage i know of is the p3 has 256kb L2 cache while the celeron has 128kb L2 cache but the celeron has twice the speed. On sl5 and 6 i used gnome. I still have the p3 lying around.

Naaah, the Northwood P4 Celeron is certainly faster than a P3 (I upgraded from a P3 to a Northwood P4 Celeron in 2004 that's why I'm sure), I suspect a hardware problem, maybe your hard disk has started to die? It could have been triggered by the reinstall which implies quite a lot of disk activity.

Try using a different hard disk, and also run memtest86 for at least 8-12 hours to test the RAM.

Come to mention it, I did throw in an extra hard disk I found lying around the celeron motherboard. I disonnected it and that brought the celeron up to 70% video playback of the pentium 3 configuration. The memtest check out fine. I am however, using the vesa graphics drivers since r128 driver makes 1280*1024 look like 800*600 despite the fact it really is 1280*1024 confirmed in screenshot jpeg properties. Even when I change the resolution down to 800*600, it still plays at only 70% quality. Note, I also used vesa in SL5.7 when I had the pentium3 processing. Thanks for the help so far. The hardware that has been swapped/added since the pentium3/SL5.7 configuration is: swapped, motheroboard, processor and ram from the celeron. added cdrom drive, added then just removed 40gb hdd(the removed one just described).

Forgot to mention: the motherboard is ECS P4VXASD2. Is this a known bad model?