Hi, Well, I've narrowed it down to bad performance only occuring during HDD activity. It's IDE, it's supposed to be ATA/66, but when you accesss the drive intensly (untar, mkisofs) the load avarage goes WAY up and all other apps are affected. Playing mpeg/avi files off the thing is near impossible. The video capture works really badly as well... no idea what do to about THAT one... -Yaron --