How slow can you go

A few weeks ago I received a new Asus Eee PC 900 netbook that I ordered from Buy.com.  I don't use it all the time since I have my regular Mac laptop set up for daily use, but the netbook is awesome for school-related stuff when I need Windows programs.  I have two programs on there for use with seminary things (BibleWorks and WordSearch), and I love being able to take the netbook on my bike and not worry about a hard drive getting screwed up due to hitting a pothole or whatever.

But, it's slow... painfully slow... way slower than my 3-year-old MacBook Pro, that's for sure.  Once things are running it can be alright, but most of the time it takes about 30 seconds to register that I clicked somewhere.  I'm half tempted to get out my "dino laptop" and compare the two - "dino laptop" was used when I got it in 2003, and I believe it's a Pentium II 400 MHz with like 256 MB RAM.  I'm wondering which would be slower, that or my brand new netbook!

Today I got fed up enough that I contacted Asus support about it.  Apparently, I have 2 options.  One is to send it into them for repair (even though it works great except for the speed), and the other is to run the support DVD that came with it.  I don't want to send it back because first of all I need it for my Prophets class, and second of all that'd be a pain when it really does work.  The big problem with the second option is that I can't run the DVD!  Netbooks don't have CD/DVD drives!!  The lady from support told me I'd have to get an external CD drive.  Just so I can run their DVD, which may or may not fix the issues?  I don't think so!

So I guess I'm just going to deal with its slowness.  Sometimes it's fine, and sometimes things take forever.  The other day I waited a full 5 minutes for Firefox to launch.  Sometimes clicks take up to 30 seconds or so to register, other times it's fine.

If anyone knows of a way to speed things up, please let me know!  Windows stuff is a bit out of my league.  I've looked around on some forums online and apparently this problem is more widespread than just me, but I couldn't find any good solutions to it.  Fortunately t does still serve my purposes, but I was hoping for something with just a little more pep, especially being a new computer!