One way to see what's going on (that's included with Slackware) is GKrellM.
Open a terminal, start it with
You can close the terminal window and GKrellM will keep running.
You'll get a graphic "stick" that shows your CPUs, Procs, Disk, Eth0, ppp0, Memory, Swap and up time.
Grab it and move it over to the right side of the screen where you can see it.
Your CPUs should display right about 0 - 1% use when the system is just sitting there mumbling to itself (with Firefox and Thunderbird running, for example), you should have something like 512 processes, disk should be pretty much nothing, eth0 about nothing, memory and swap about nothing.
If the CPus are at more than 50%, you need to find (using the tools recommended by others above) what's doing that: what's running and why is the question. The Mem and Swap displays are a horizontal ruler type display and they should rarely being doing much of anything.
Keep in mind that a quiescent system (even with X and a couple of applications running) isn't doing much. There are a lot of processes started but they're mostly interrupt driven and just sit there waiting for something to trigger them. Things like Firefox and Thunderbird don't do much most of the time (typing this doesn't cause any bumps in the fields).
If you've got an application that is either poorly designed or is a huge memory hog (which indicates a poor design too) and that drives the CPUs to 90% or more, might be time to look carefully at that application, eh?
Hope this helps some.