Hi,

This afternoon I booted Linux and started KDE. For some reason everything was very slow - opening menus, dragging windows, scrolling text ... In the console "top" showed that 37 -40 % of the CPU time is used by the system, while the only process which was running was top. I killed all of the processes, but nothing changed. Kernel 2.6.7 shows 47 % si (What is "si"?), 2.4.29 shows 40 % system.

I tried also Windows Me and XP and all of the operating systems were working very slow! It is a pain to open explorer or to browse internet. The speed is like 486 ! I had a similar case in the past and the reason was the network card. After unplugging and plugging it again everything worked. The same is now - if i unplug the cable the PC is working normally, but if I plug it it slows down. However this time unplugging the NIC itself doesn't help and I must select between slow system and no network. Can anybody suggest what's the reason. Do you think it's the network, or the NIC? Yesterday everything was working fine.
Thank you in advance.

If your processor load is oddly high and sluggish in both windows and linux it would indicate something terribly wrong with your hardware.

All your fans are working?

If it's a P4 or AMD System with thermal monitor it might be throttling back the CPU because of excessive heat. You should really check your hardware out and make sure everything is spinning as it should be.

After I took a bath, everything is fine. However I can't understand how can the network make such a high processor load, and since I don't know the reason I don't know what to do if the problem persist. It sure has something to do with the network. The CPU speed was OK, I never had overheating problems.