You should not have to build a kernel of your own today for two reasons: 1. since the O(1) scheduler that was introduced in kernel 2.4-2.6, there is no impact in performance, and 2. modern systems have enough memory to have non-needed modules loaded. I disagree with "sterling" on that there are few modules compiled into modern kernels. "Few" is ambiguous. Most kernels support a crap-load of hard-drive controllers, raid controllers, etc, so that people do not have to "modprobe" when they bring up a system in the case that automatic hardware detection via "lspci" and the like does not work or hardware paremeters are missing. "Few" modules serve most people's needs (80% or more) out of the box that way. Slackware comes with _so_many_ harddrive controllers. But Patrick knows better. So, he has a "huge" kernel that will take care of 99% of your needs on any system, aa "scsi" which is a misnomer for legacy reasons and covers what I said above (a lot f ocontrollers) and some other more minimal kernels. As a rule to live by, if you are concerned with your kernel being too large because of memory requirements, you are wasting your time with really old hardware. This does not apply to Raspberry Pi people, or anyone running any embedded ARM based Linux, but those people should know what they are doing to begin with... As for quickly configuring a kernel, do not throw away your old .config files. Throw them in the new kernel source directry and you will mostly have to "not anser" for including modules as it will be preset to what you had in tthe earlier kernel build. Even compiling the kernel is not a problem now, and it used to take days when I was being stupid back in the day. I have not had to build a kernel in over 6 years. IN