Not using swap isn’t something I’d recommend without a lot more memory than you have, especially as with a processor that old your ram is probably ddr
Disabling swap used to be a popular(ish) thing to do in windoze in an attempt to speed things up but linux handles memory differently to windows anyway, many would say better than windows and according to top you’re only using about half of your available ram
Mem: 2060860k total, 1062896k used, 997964k free, 50232k buffers
Generally speaking the slicker something is the more resources it uses and kde is pretty slick and feature-rich, so given the limited resources your machine has the earlier suggestion about trying the lxde desktop is something worth thinking about, you would still be able to use your kde apps in lxde. To be fair mate, although you say your computer isn’t ‘that bad’ it isn’t really that good either, I was running a machine with similar spec to that back in the early days of xp so you are talking very dated hardware and things have moved on an awful lot since that hardware came out
You certainly don’t need the latest and greatest kit to run OpenSuse well, I have a machine here with ddr ram that runs 11.4 perfectly well but then it does have a 2 gig dual-core skt939 athlon cpu and pci-e graphics wheeras your geforce 6 is very possibly agp, and with kit as old (and probably tired) as what you’re running there’s a limit to what you can expect of it. Having said all that though, here’s a couple of things you can try that may or may not help your kde run a bit better
Use a solid colour for your desktop background instead of any of the other types (it’s usually an image)
Click your menu, open System Settings, Desktop Search and if Strigi desktop file indexer is enabled, disable it & Apply it then go back to Overview
Go into Startup and Shutdown, Service Manager. In the Startup Services section there are probably some things you can turn off:
Bluetooth isn’t something people use so much these days so if you don’t need or rarely use bluetooth there are 2 services here you can turn off by unticking them, bluedevil and obexftp I believe they’re called
synaptiks is for laptop touchpads but even with it off my laptop works fine so you may not need this one either
KPackageKit Service, a lot of people turn this one off purely because they don’t like kpackagekit preferring to use yast or zypper to do their updates, using yast or zypper for it isn’t any great hardship
NetworkManager, unless it’s a laptop that you regularly connect to different networks can be disabled but be aware you may have to reconfigure your connection using Yast
Now go to Yast, System, System Services (runlevel) and there may be some more in here you can turn off
brld - unless a blind person uses your computer you don’t need this
cups - if you don’t use a printer this should be safe to turn off
sshd - if you don’t access your computer from another machine using ssh or nx you can turn this off, might even make your machine a bit more secure
vbox entries - If you have any of these and don’t use VirtualBox to run virtual machines you don’t need anything with vbox in it’s name
There’s also at least one bluetooth entry in there but I can’t remember what it/they are called as I have everything bluetooth removed for a reason I won’t bother going into
As I said disabling this stuff may or may not make your kde run better and other people may be able to suggest other things you can disable or even disagree with some I’ve said that you can, I do know of some others that can be turned off but I’ve tried to avoid suggesting you try turning off anything that may have an adverse effect on your system. Every system and it’s usage scenario is different so often when trying this kind of stuff out you’re just going with a ‘suck it and see’ approach, meaning you won’t know if changing something’s gonna improve things until you try them … and sometimes you may even break things, so just be careful and use some common sense
