Today I fired a fresh CVS Emacs and, with great surprise, noticed that
the screen is painted with acceptable speed on my old 550 MHz
machine. The second odd thing is that the font used was not the one I
expected. Emacs was using
-raster-MS Sans Serif-normal-normal-normal-sans-16-*-*-*-p-*-iso8859-1
so I changed the default font to
-outline-Courier New-normal-normal-normal-mono-16-*-*-*-c-*-iso8859-1
and the slowness manifested again. It is my impression that it is not so
bad as some weeks ago, though.