Wow, this sounds sort of like the problem I've been having. I'm running at Turion notebook as well. The specs are:
Turion64 x2 tl-64 (2.2ghz), 2gb DDR2-667, 100gb HD (works with nForceATA), Atheros WLAN, etc. The whole thing just seems to run slow, even the clock!! It seems like some sort of timing issue, but I've been unable to resolve it using the typical boot flags (idlehalt=0, cpus=1). I've tried most every distribution that will work on AMD (Zephyroth, Kalyway, Leo4all) all with the same results. Does this sound similar to you??