Toshiba laptop slows down after time and needs cold boot

[Bill Christiansen]

I am running Ubuntu on my Toshiba Satellite 4090XCDT laptop and it's
impressive but I have a strange problem. I noticed it's performance was
excellent from a cold boot but after running for some time it would
intermittently get extremely slow. What I think is happening is power
management puts the cpu into sleep mode but it's not waking it up
properly so it only runs at about 10% of it's normal throughput (apps
will load if you wait long enough but it takes for ever). Acpi doesn't
get loaded due to the age of the bios but I put apm in the /etc/modules
and that loads and the laptop battery monitor stuff works fine. I had a
look in the bios but there's no way to disable the cpu's sleep mode. Is
there any parameters I can add to apm to disable sleep mode or any other
suggestions.
Cheers
Bill