Hey guys I recently decided to install linux as my primary OS however after a weeks worth of work on this project I remain completely stuck with one huge issue. Within 0-15 minutes of booting up a linux distro my mouse begins to stagger violently becoming barely movable, also keyboard input becomes extremely slow along with a dramatic slow down of the entire machine.

Oddly enough this has yet to happen when running off any live cd and no problems at all in windows XP pro. I have currently tried Ubuntu version 8 and 7 (would prefer to get hardy heron working), kubuntu, opensuse, and fedora. I have tried various 64 and 32 bit versions to no avail.

Thinking perhaps this is a memory issue I have run memtest86 for over 16 hours but no reported errors. I have also tried letting the OS run without updates and with full updates. Also tried useing ATI drivers for video card vs. using system default drivers. Nothing so far has worked. This has got me completly stumped and any advice would be welcome. Below is a list off my head of my current hardware. If more info or specifics are needed please let me know and I will find out.

Processor: AMD Athlon 64 fx 2600
Ram: 2 gig over 4 512 corsair ddr2 333 sticks
Video card: Radeon x1600 agp 512 ram
Harddrive: 250 gig sata
Powersupply: 600watt

Thank you in advance for any help you can give I have run out of idea's.

This looks similar to a kernel issue I have with OpenSUSE and Fedora; try booting with the 'noapic nolapic smp=off' parameters (check your distro documentation on how to do that, usually you press a key within the boot screen and pass those parameters to the kernel).

Hey this seems to have worked thank you so much.

I am having the same problem in Kubuntu 8.04.1. What is the method to implement "noapic nolapic smp=off" ?

I noticed that Kopete has been an issue-- since I switched to Pidgin, it is faster, but startup of applications such as OOo Writer can be very long. Is this the same problem or a different one?

You will need to add these commands to grub. The easiest way is to open /boot/grub/menu.lst and add it at the end of the line beginning kernel /boot/vmlinuz....