linux gets laggy?

well ive been playing with redhat 9.0 and every thing is nice but after like 3 programs are ran on the system its gets really laggy like theres no more ram left or something to proccess stuff
i have plenty of ram and a good proccessor

pc spec'e

thunderbird 1.4
384mb of pc133 sdram
20gig harddrive
ATI all in wonder 7800

it seems like things arnt turning off when i close them or something getting cought up in the proccesses i dont know reallymuch about linux i only use the linux to run test befor i do it on my web server
it runs fine when useing webmin or putty
it mite just be the graphical part i dont know any help would be nice

thanks

zach

hmm I dunno man thats weird :\
have you tried testing your ram ?

well heh the only problem is..is that i dont have another pc that support SDram :-/ well i would think if the ram was bad the pc wouldn't boot and give two beeping sounds correct?>
plus when linux boots it doesn't give a error with the memory.
but i thinking that the ram mite be diffent not the speed but how it go's in the motherboard like witch one go's closes to the proccesser i forget what its called ill have to check that out



zach