1. Welcome to Linux, don't berate yourself, you know more than you think. 2. These lists are great, the advice is great, you did the right thing which is to ask AFTER you have done all you can on your end 3. Re: your particular partition scheme, it sounds as if Red Hat has done a default installation. If that is the case, then yes, Red Hat/Fedora has eradicated your windows partitions and created its own. There is no C: and D: naming in Linux so your partitions will all have names like /dev/hda physical hard drive a /dev/hda1 partition on physical hard drive a but it will also automatically create a swap partition for you (swapping hard disk space for memory optimization purposes). Sometimes you can adjust the swap to make things go faster, but in this case you might just wanna reinstall and see if an increase makes a differrence. The usual rule of thumb is 'twice the physical memory' so if you have say 512 MB you need to put in 1000 MB or 1 GB. 4. Memory optimization is a BIG topic and may be too much to bite off right now until you are more familiar with Linux. What are the specs of this machine? Sounds like this is an older box - am I right? Although Red Hat will load on older machines, having better hardware does make a big differrence. Good luck and post any specific problems that you have and we'll go from there. Cheers, Marc<div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list" target="_blank"> </a></blockquote></div>