Description of Problem: Running on an IBM ThinkPad 240, after starting X the system appears to pause every few seconds (most noticeable when using the mouse, which just stops moving). How Reproducible: Run a laptop install on a ThinkPad 240, run X, move the mouse around Steps to Reproduce: 1. Start X on IBM ThinkPad 240 2. Move mouse around 3. Actual Results: Mouse stops moving for a moment every few seconds (system stops responding). Expected Results: System should run smoothly all the time and mouse motion should be smooth. Additional Information: After some investigation it appeared to be the battery applet which was causing the problem - increasing the time between updates caused the pauses to happen less often. Disabling the battery applet fixed the problem completely.
Arjan, could this be kernel related?
Or more likely, a bug in the applet causing it to consume CPU and slow X down. Most probably not an XFree86 bug.
Bios bug; some biosses take forever to determine batterystatus and the battery applet then causes evil things ...
After Arjan's comment I checked the BIOS version and found there had been 14 releases since the version I had. I upgraded to the latest version (1.16) and the applet doesn't appear to cause any degradation in performance now. Thanks.