It's things like this that are killing gnome: top - 21:45:20 up 20 days, 10:52, 5 users, load average: 6.30, 4.24, 3.65 Tasks: 274 total, 2 running, 271 sleeping, 0 stopped, 1 zombie Cpu(s): 13.5%us, 5.8%sy, 0.0%ni, 80.0%id, 0.3%wa, 0.3%hi, 0.1%si, 0.0%st Mem: 32842188k total, 32237528k used, 604660k free, 115152k buffers Swap: 67076092k total, 1051676k used, 66024416k free, 679320k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 7261 gerryr 20 0 1735m 177m 16m S 475.2 0.6 12617:11 gnome-shell $ glxinfo | grep renderer OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on llvmpipe (LLVM 0x300) This machine has an Intel HD P4000 GPU so why is it using llvmpipe? gnome-shell is wrecking this machine. Sometimes gnome will find and use the GPU just fine and others like this machine, no matter what you do it insists on using llvmpipe which just kills performance.