A way to guarentee 2% of CPU not in use?

Tue Jun 13 11:57:54 UTC 2006

I just had ESD lock my laptop up and make it unusably slow.
I couldn't even get an already open shell session to come up because
it was maxed out with 100% CPU in use.
is there some way to guarantee at least 2% of cpu to never get used?
Like a general system nice command or something?

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