On Thu, 2004-11-04 at 19:51 +0100, Arjan van de Ven wrote: > On Thu, 2004-11-04 at 13:40 -0500, Steffen Persvold wrote: > > Hi all, > > > > I just recently installed FC3 RC3 on my Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop and > > experienced _really_ wierd hard-drive performance (IDE drive). At first > > I noticed it when trying to start applications such as Evolution, > > FireFox, OpenOffice etc. but then I started testing it with hdparm -t : > > > > # hdparm -t /dev/hda > don't use hdparm! > > it's very unreliable for measuring performance; please use something > like tiobench (tiobench.sf.net) Arjan, Event though I agree that hdparm -t is not the correct tool to test hard drive performance, your missing my point. My original problem was that Applications such as Evolution, Firefox, OpenOffice, disk access in general was _really_ slow. Turning off the HAL daemon fixed that. Regards, Steffen