Opening two applications almost let the system being unusable.
Even worse, the frequency scaling of the CPU stopped working and was running at full speed all the time, heating the laptop, but going slow nevertheless.
First I thought it was a problem of the CPU scaling, so I installed cpufreqd, which at least slowed down the CPU a bit, very little.
Still wondering, ..., why?
I had installed my Dell laptop from zero, so I also thought it might have to do with the graphics driver, as compiz was impossible to use as well.
Then I started investigating a little further and I found several posts from users with the same symptoms, and everything pointed to a kernel 2.6.35 problems, the version that ships with Ubuntu 10.10
People said that upgrading to next kernel version solved that problem, so I tried that and it worked.
Now, I have a quicker system again.
Guess, I could have waited for Ubuntu 11.04, but if you have the same problem, and want to quick up your system, download a higher kernel version from here (2.6.36 rc7 for 32Bit, 2.6.36 rc8 for 64Bit systems).
Install instructions
wget -nc -q -P /tmp http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v2.6.36-rc7-maverick/linux-{headers,image}-2.6.36-020636rc7{-generic,}_2.6.36-020636rc7.201010070908_{all,i386}.deb
sudo dpkg -i /tmp/linux-{headers,image}-2.6.36-020636rc7{-generic,}_2.6.36-020636rc7.201010070908_{all,i386}.debSoftware Update will offer you updates from kernel 2.6.35 which you might install without problem, as grub boot process will still find the newer 2.6.36 kernel and offers and boot that as the default one from the list anyway.
