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Here are a few of my gripes - most of them a result of excessive patching. IDLE-TIME PROCESS. Once in a while the system will go into an idle mode, requiring from five minutes to half an hour to unwind. It's weird, and I almost always have to reboot. When I hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete, I see that the System Idle Process is hogging all the resources and chewing up 95 percent of the processor's cycles. Doing what? Doing nothing? Once in a while, after you've clicked all over the screen trying to get the system to do something other than idle, all your clicks suddenly ignite and the screen goes crazy with activity. This is not right.
—John C. Dvorak, 9/29/2003
Yeah, the problem he's describing is completely unrelated to the CPU. It occurs when you've got a very large IO operation going on with your system HDD from a single process, the longer the operation goes on the more likely it becomes for your system to start shitting up because the other processes would quite like to access the disk too thank-you-very-much.
Kleeneness is next to Godelness.