I have some Linux experience before, (successfully) installing Debian and CentOS system.
I have recently installed Fedora 12 64 bit on my system and am very disappointed.
the system is very slow and buggy.

I dual boot Fedora and Win7 and I don't have as many problems there(ie no dual head problem, and saving image works immediately .
I have disabled programs like bluetooth from startup but it didn't change anything.

my main complaints:
1. System boot (or any program) takes a long time (~3 mins for system, and about 30 seconds for any program) to load until I am able to use it properly.
2. Nautulis/thunar randomly crash or don't display folder contents.
3. When saving a document or image under firefox - firefox (or the program I'm using) hangs (see picture).
4. I have a dual-head setup, and it is impossible for me to view movies on the right screen as at the half screen I get a blank (see picture). It is noticeable that the orange VLC cone doesn't come up, but it is there.
5. Any 3d acceleration (compiz,screensaver)crashes my setup. The wierd thing is if I use a knoppix cd the computer is super fast with 3d acceleration working.

if needed, I will provide more info.

specs:
amd 3500+
2gb ram
ati x700

fedora: 2.6.31.9-174.fc12.x86_64

http://i48.tinypic.com/oa5c1u.jpg
http://i46.tinypic.com/mihsmo.png

thanks,

Try hdparm -Tt /dev/sda and see if the correct driver is loading. Sometimes 'generic' drivers aren't and you only have a few MB/S on the disks.
Try top and see what's grabbing the resources.
Your ATI driver will probably be a disaster area. Fix that. There's radeon, radeonhd, and fglrx YMMV. In fact your mileage will vary.
Post short bits of anything juicy.

hey, hdparm returns these values:

wd 320 aaks (main harddrive):
/dev/sdb:
Timing cached reads: 1328 MB in 2.00 seconds = 663.70 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 218 MB in 3.01 seconds = 72.31 MB/sec

wd 750 aaks:
/dev/sdc:
Timing cached reads: 1284 MB in 2.00 seconds = 642.25 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 270 MB in 3.02 seconds = 89.43 MB/sec

wd 1.5tb green (backup drive):
/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 1372 MB in 2.00 seconds = 686.22 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 292 MB in 3.02 seconds = 96.68 MB/sec

That doesn't seem to be really slow..

top shows some interesting stuff:
VIRT: Xorg=180mb+ , firefox=640mb+(7 tabs this site and text based sites=no javascript,flash running),metacity=269mb+,konsole=500mb+,xmms=260mb+,multiload-apple=300mb+ .

Regarding Ati, there have been some problems reported with the Ati driver and fedora so I'll try and get a workaround.

Thanks,