First of all, thanks for your answer.
I know for sure it detects the RAM, and there should be nothing wrong with the processor itself (2500 bogomips).
I do have plenty of swap space (500MB), the system does detect my RAM (256MB)
I had considered the possibility of being a HD controller problem, but I sincerely don't know how to try different settings.
My partitioning scheme is a small /boot partition, then some 4 or 5 GB for / , the 500MB for swap space, then the rest in FAT for sharing files.
Looking at /var/log/messages I get the following errors (or strange things - perhaps I should mention that the computer is so slow I can see the screen updating when I hit Page Up or Page Down with less):
rc.sysinit: mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/hda7, or too many mounted file systems:
/etc/hotplug/usb.agent: .... no drivers for USB product 0/0/0
kernel: Unknown bridge resource 0: assuming transparent
kernel: Unknown bridge resource 2: assuming transparent
kernel: ide: Assuming 33Mhz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
kernel: PIIX5: not 100%% native mode: will probe irqs later
kernel: fatfs: bogus cluster size
kernel: VFS: can't find a valid MSDOS filesystem on device 03:07
apmd[699]: Charge: * * * (-1% unknown)
I don`t know if this is an error, but there is a 7 minute lag between these 2 msgs:
sshd: Generating SSH2 DSA host key:
DSA key generation succeeded
(I`m assuming this is a somewhat slow process, and because of the problem on my computer it takes so much longer)
there is another 8 minute lag between the following messages:
kernel: hdc: ATAPI 48X CD-ROM drive, 128kB cache, UDMA 33MHz, Uniform CD-ROM Driver Revision: 3.12
login(pam_unix)[988]: session opened for user carlos by LOGIN(uid=0)
I hope this can be of help... I'm pending quite toward re-installing (UGH) NT now, because I've fought this beast for over a week, my boss is in my ass and I can't show any progress
Thank you again,
Carlos