I realised that acpi was not working correctly on my Laptop installation of Ubuntu so when I saw a tip for getting it working on the Ubuntu Forums I decided to give it a shot. Just by adding:
acpi=force
as a kernel parameter, either at boot using grub and saved it into /boot/grub/menu.lst
And too my surprise it not only make acpi work but actually sped up the responsiveness of the entire distribution making it entirely usable…. So if I ever do another install I think I will be passing that as a boot parameter :).
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