Okay here's the thing...
I installed Linux on a 700mhz Athlon w/128mb ram so I could learn about Linux. When I run X-Windows, it is really slow. I set a friggin' huge swapfile size (1 GB). I know that in MS Windows you have to set a thing in the system.ini file that says: ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1, otherwise MSwindows will use the swapfile as much as it wants and (almost) never use the physical memory. Could linux be like windows in that respect?

128MB of RAM is quite small by today's standards. Why don't you run the command top to see what is taking up your resources. However, if you really want to up your performance, you should get some more RAM. It's very cheap on ebay.

I have a P3-800 with 384MB of RAM running redhat fedora core 2 and KDE. I dont have problems with X being slow.

Yeah I know ram is cheap, but I have no money at the moment. I don't think I phrased my question very well; could my enormous swapfile be contributing to the slow-down?

Setting up 1GB swap space is not going to help when you have 128MB of RAM, and if the kernel somehow could use that much swap, it would be very slow paging in-and-out.

As Dangrel said, you need RAM.

and for 128MB RAM, I advise 256MB of swap space, or less (prefer less).

Read this:

http://howtos.linux.com/guides/sag/s...location.shtml

... for more info.

Your enormous swapfile is a silly waste of disk space. But no, simply reducing the size of your swapfile will not speed up your system.