Long periods of screen inactivity while the HD churns

[Colin Brace]

On 1/22/07, N. Pauli <npauli at st-johns.org.uk> wrote:

> Does anybody have a clue what can be causing this?

No, but running 'top' in a terminal window might given you an idea of
what processing start using more CPU when, for example, you launch
Nautilus. Although disk-intenstive operations don't necessarily
require much CPU, they will nonetheless nearly always appear at the
the list because they require *some* CPU cycles.

Top also supplies a lot of information about memory usage. 1 Gb of RAM
is very generous and should be way more than enough, but something may
be hogging memory and causing disk-swapping; take a close look at the
Swap line and the VIRT column in top.

HTH

-- 
  Colin Brace
  Amsterdam