I use a small utility called import from ImageMagick package to periodically take screenshots of my X session. It's run once a minute from a cron job. What I don't like is the fact, that it freezes X for 1-2 seconds. I can do nothing during taking the screenshot - mouse and keyboard don't respond, even mp3 player sometimes stops to play music for a short period.

I tried to start import with nice and then even "nice 19" - no difference.

Anyone can give me an advice? It's pretty annoying to work on a system, which freezes for 1-2 seconds every minute.

Or should I just buy an Athlon X2 and stop bothering myself with nice?

PS.
Some additional info, maybe useful: I use Ubuntu 5.10 with Gnome.

My first advice is to not take a screenshot every minute. Why would one do that??

Well, thank you, but this is no real advice. It's like saying: "if something doesn't work very well, just stop using it, you don't really need it". I prefer repairing things instead of stopping to use them...