<div class="gmail_quote">On 24 February 2011 09:29, Rossen Stoyanchev <<a href="mailto:rstoyanchev@yahoo.com">rstoyanchev@yahoo.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"> Hi- Apologies if this isn't the right place. Having started as a Ubuntu user in 7.04 I find myself completely baffled by the this one. Every now and then an application starts using a lot of CPU. This is typically when running Flash or Java typically in a browser but I'm not completely sure about what triggers. The strange thing is that once the problem occurs all applications become affected. Even simple things like opening a file browser or dragging windows around spikes the CPU to 100% for 10-15 seconds or longer. It's like a gradual melt-down with the system becoming unusable even for simple tasks. The only solution at that point is powering off the laptop completely, which takes a long time since all processes are now really slow to close down. Needless to say a very debilitating problem to have and I'm baffled as to how to narrow things down. I know how to look up CPU usage by process with top but when all applications begin to exhibit this behavior that's pretty much useless. </blockquote></div> I had that problem with Flash on 64-bit on my Dell XPS M1330. I've now gone to a PAE kernel as the only reason I had 64 bit was for memory access and that's mostly gone away. A BIOS update has also solved some of the colling problems that that model has with its NVIDIA graphics card. We would need more information about your setup to come up with a more specific solution. s/ -- Twitter: @sfgreenwood<div>My CV: <a href="http://bit.ly/sfgreenwood_cv" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/sfg</a>_new_cv "Is this your sanderling?" </div>