Hi, Nick Rogers wrote:
[...] Whenever I do something that involves a lot of disc activity,
Did you try to kill automount ?It seems to slow acces to media, specially on a laptop which don't have floppy drive.
DMA is although not enabled by default, may you try to boot with: knoppix dma or enable it in menu KNOPPIX > Utilities > Harddisk/CD/DVD DMA acelleration. Jody