fedora??? well thats your problem, i HAD redhat (fedora is based on redhat) for a while, and it was faster than winxp, because I'm a tweak freak with my computer, and i had run out of line in winxp, but could go so much further with redhat, but it still wasn't snappy, took over 50seconds to bootup, i can't deal with that!! so i got gentoo linux, it BLOWS REDHAT OUT OF THE WATER!!! under 20sec bootup, optimized for MY computer not a 10 year old 386 like redhat did, it was (and still is 3 years later) blazing fast, windows explorer took over 2seconds to load, konqueror takes under 1 second on my machine!!
heres my system specs if you want to know:
athlon xp 2500+ barton core
biostar m7ncd mother board (NFORCE2 chipset)
512mb ddr2700 (333mhz)
nvidia geforce 256 32mb (yes its a old card in a new computer)
seagate 27gb harddrive 7200rpm rated at 66mb/sec true transfer 48mb/sec
gentoo linux, kernel mm-sources-2.6.7-rc2
nvidia video driver, gcc-3.4.3
redhat (fedora) is a old yugo, and gentoo is a new Ferrari enzo in terms of performance, if you want a fast pc, windows is not the solution, nor is fedora, ideally you need to build the entire system from scratch (with gentoo its called a stage1)

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1982 300D (w123, "Grey Car")
1982 300D (w123, "Blue Car")
2001 Ford F150 "Clifford" (The Big Red Truck)
1997 Dodge Ram 2500 12V Cummins
1996 Dodge Ram 2500 12V Cummins
Previous Vehicles:
1995 E300D, 1980 300SD, 1992 Buick Century, 2005 Saturn Ion