high average load and kernel recompilation

[Pol]

Mario Vukelic wrote:
> What are your hardware specs?

It is hp tc4200 laptop, 1.7 GHz (but i am used to keep it in 'powersave'
mode, at 0.8GHz) , 1.5MB ram, 2GB swap.

> 
> What *exactly* does it mean when you write, "many applications always
> running"? How many, which ones, what are they doing 

As i log in, several system services are started: postfix, dovecot, dictd,
hpoj, wooffle, collectd. I one of my attempts, proxy was disabled in
webbrowsers, with no change in performance, so my guess is that wwwoffle
should not affect the average load.
After log in, a few applets (kbandwidth, clock, calendar, systray), two
konsoles monitoring log files with 'tail -f', amarok are started and, from
a few more konsole sessions, 'sudo su' to four more users. 
So, there are five users, each of which starts konqueror, connects to gmail,
opens a few pdf files, starts kalarm and kgmailnotifier; sometimes lyx
editors and maxima (symbolic computations, spending most of the time as
idle) are started.
One of those users starts ktorrent; another one starts knode; another one
starts firefox (connecting to gmail and opening several google notebooks)


> That's easy: no, not noticeably. Though it is worth to check which one
> of the precompiled kernels you are running. Try "uname -r" on the
> command line and report the output here.
'uname -r'  returns:

2.6.24-23-generic


Thank you
--P