I wrestled with compiling a kernel the Debian way (a la make-kpkg) yesterday for my networking class and realized even unpacking the tarball was painfully slow on my current machine (1.1ghz AMD, 512 ram, slow drive)–painfully slow in the “bzip+tar take up 20% cpu and kill the disk” kind of way.
So I surfed up to Mware and ordered a new computer: AMD X2 3800+ (horray for dual cores!) with 1gb ram and a Seagate (Sea-GREAT!) SATA drive. I’m excited for the blazing-fast kernel compile times I’ll be experiencing in the near future :)