Running Mandrake on a FAT32 partition will slow it down considerably. The processor is irrelevant - I run Mandrake 7.2 on a P120 with 32MB RAM, and it responds faster than Windows 2000 on an AMD K6-2/450.

Giving Mandrake its own drive (or, even, partition) will help immensely...

I have a thread in the Tutorials forum about installing Mandrake, it was from quite a while ago so you may need to search back to find it, but its definitely worth reading if you're gonna try installing Mdk onto a drive/partition of its own!