First tip is nothing amazing but might help some people out a little performance wise.
 
Note: Only try this if your video card was part of the default list of cards when you installed/configured X. I dont know what it'll do if it wasn't directly supported by your distro.
 
If you open up your XF86Config located in /etc/X11 and scroll down to the 'device' section. Add a line to that section just before the 'endsection' line. The line should look like this:
 
option "accel"
 
This will make X render windows faster. It does not! make applications acctually start faster.
 
 
The second thing was touched on lightly in a previous post. It's the use of hdparm to tweak out your hard drive. I'm running a newer maxtor 40GB drive with Redhat 9. Redhat did a good job of configuring my hard drive but I did manage to squeeze and extra 6mb of transfer speed out of it. Check out the following links for the low down.
 
http://linux.oreillynet.com/pub/a/linux/2000/06/29/hdparm.html
 
and
 
These guys seem a little paranoid but they do give a good reference list of basic options for hdparm.
http://www.linuxnetmag.com/en/issue7/m7hdparm1.html
 
And of course you could always type:
 
man hdparm
 
If you've got other good ideas post them here. If you acctually know what "accel" does, post that here too. I'm pretty sure it hands x to the video accelerator rather than the processor.