Installed RC1, two concerns..

The installation of RC1 went very well.. very smooth. I quite like the aesthetic of everything thus far. Two concerns however: 1 - Performance is pretty poor compared to my Windows 2000 partition on the very same box. By 'performance' I am largely referring to load times in Gnome.. Firefox for example takes at least twice as long to load. :| Is there any way to improve this? Am I doing something wrong? 2 - The right side of my screen is 'chopped off' by several mm. Is there a way to correct this software wise or am I stuck adjusting my monitor settings each time I boot into linux? The machine is 1.3ghz with ~800mb RAM. JON