To start here's what I'm working with:
- AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ Brisbane 2.5GHz (65nm)
- ABIT AN-M2HD AM2 NVIDIA GeForce 7050PV
- G.SKILL 4GB (4 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
- Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500KSRTL 250GB (80GB partition set aside for linux, 64-bit Vista Home Premium on the 160GB partition)
- GeForce 8400 GS
I'm running 32-bit Fedora 8 (someone lent me the disc after several copies of the 64-bit installation DVD ISO I burned didn't work properly and I was too lazy to download it and burn it again...) and one thing I've noticed is that lately Fedora always seems to be utilizing almost exactly half of the CPU resources. Fedora sees the dual core CPU as two processors and the sum of the percentage used for each core always adds up to roughly 100%. In other words, one core will be at ~40% and the other will be at ~60%, or ~70% and ~30%, etc. The CPU fan can run at variable speeds, but its always running at full speed in Fedora. For the most part the system is still very responsive, however when doing some simple things, such as clicking on the desktop and dragging the cursor around, the system suddenly starts to slow down for no apparent reason. It appears that either there is something running somewhere hogging half of my CPU resources, or else something is misconfigured. In either case, I have no idea how to track down the problem. There isn't much installed on this partition that wasn't an update except the latest nVidia linux drivers.
My second question is a fairly straightforward one, whenever I use sudo in a terminal window within the GUI and then enter the root password, I get an incorrect password message. However, if I exit X or go to a full screen terminal, with Ctrl + Alt + F1 for example, I have no problems entering the same password and running the command.
On a side note, for a while, I had no problem hitting Ctrl + Alt + F1 to switch to a terminal and then Ctrl + Alt + F7 to go back to the GUI, but lately, when I hit Ctrl + Alt + F7, I get nothing but a black screen and the cursor. I have no idea whats going on here, but any help you guys can give me is much appreciated, as always.