performance tuning?

[quadrant]

Hi all. I have a question about the speed at which my applications are
running. I have a dual boot Win98 and FreeBSD 4.8-stable (separate hard
drives). In winblows, my multimedia is great - no hesitations, smooth
audio and video, etc. But in FreeBSD, any application I run seems
to go MUCH slower. MP3 audio is slow, and slows even more if I even
only move my mouse. Video is a waste of time, playing perhaps
1/2 the speed that it does in winblows.
I have:
Cyrix pentium II (300 MHz)
128 MB RAM
Radeon 7000 (32MB) video card.
Even if I configure KDE to "run soundserver with realtime priority,"
this does absolutely nothing. I don't believe X is slowing it down (too much),
because even in console mode, mpg123 plays mp3 audio just as slow
as when I'm using X. Even when I kill -9 all background daemons
(i.e. httpd, smtp, pop3, ssh, telnet...) it still goes this slow. 
How can I go about performance tuning my apps? Any help would be
greatly appreciated!
Eric