This computer is running the latest Ubuntu and works pretty well. The problem I'm having appears to be with Compiz and Xorg (though I'm not sure). I've tried searching and found that maybe there's something about AIGLX and Compiz when using an Nvidia card that might be causing issue, but I'm not sure where to check for that or how to correct it yet.

Basically the problem is that I'm seeing drastic slowdowns, especially when using Firefox, but I think that's just because it's a full screen app that changes screens (tabs) a lot. I see Xorg jump to 40% or higher of CPU usage when raising and lowering windows, so it makes me suspect Compiz.

Any help figuring this out would be greatly appreciated. If there's a similar thread that I can follow, I'll be happy to get that link as well (I didn't find one)

Are you using this setup with KDE or Gnome? Try using Compiz by itself without KDE/Gnome and see if you get better results.

Also without more information, one can not really help you with this question. Can you tell us a little more about your computer setup and programs running on your box?

If you have other programs running like apache2, you might want to stop all unneeded services.

I'm running Gnome on that box. I'm afraid I have no idea what you mean by running Compiz without Gnome or KDE ... I thought Compiz was a window decorator that required one or the other for the framework to work on. Guess I'm wrong .

I'd love to tell you anything else I can about the box, but I'm not sure what else is relevant ... it's just a desktop box (not a server), so there aren't many services running on it. The only one turned on is NFS so it can share storage space with my fedora box (though I'm only sharing files there, nothing is running from that shared location).

I'm running Firefox 3 and have tried deleting the old profile and starting over, but I'm still seeing quite often that Xorg and Firefox each jump up above 40% of CPU usage. The CPU is a 2 GHz P4, so it should be able to handle this pretty basic usage.

I don't see these slowdowns when using open office or thunderbird (the only other programs I really use on there).