Really REALLY slow computer

[zephod at cfl.rr.com]

D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote

> Sometimes machines run slowly due to being swamped by unhandled
> interrupts.  It would be interesting to monitor /proc/interrupts to
> see if this is happening.

I don't know what I'm looking for but there are 2 things that I 
noticed about the contents of the /proc/interrupts file:

1. when I typed 'cat /proc/interrupts' I got a message saying 
something like 'file not terminated correctly'. I don't remember the 
exact wording. It looks like a few characters and the end-of-line are 
missing. I'm guessing that this is no big deal and that cat read the 
file in the middle of an update.

2. The LOC line has some large numbers; ~1500000 for each processor. 
This is immediately after boot up, (Immediate isn't the right word as 
it takes ~45mins to boot and log in) Is this normal?

I have updated to FC7T4 and I am now running the 2.6.21-1.3116 kernel 
which someone suggested would correct the problem but it did not. I 
have also tried with acpi=off as a kernel option but that didn't 
change anything either.

HP dc7700p, 2G RAM, 2x250G

Steve