[Wine] Poor wine performance

[Passiday]

Hello,

I wanted to give wine a test (never used it before), so I went forth and installed it on my - humble but not too lousy system:

CPU: Intel Pentium M 1.80GHz
Memory: 512MB
Graphics controller: ATI RV350 (Mobility Radeon 9600 M10)

While I had Windows 2000 on it, I was able to run the good old HalfLife2 pretty nice, so I thought I'd give it a shot. This site (http://www.linux-gamers.net/modules/wiwimod/index.php?page=HOWTO%20Steam) gave me confidence that it's at least possible.

What I experience, however, is quite depressing. I managed to install and run Steam, but the preformance is apalling. Even though I finally was able to go and start installing the app (will take some time to download), the Steam crashed shortly after that and any subsequent attempts to launch it again result in terrible system performance (ie, browsing the web on Firefox at the same time is almost impossible), very active use of HDD, and even after hours of intensive HDD digging and system resource hogging there is no visible result - the wine apparently has aborted.

I'd be happy to hear how should I diagnose the problem. Or, maybe my system is just too poor to run HL2 over wine in Linux. Maybe there is some problem in some settings?