Hi guys. From couple of weeks inspired by this community I am playing around with Linux. Trying to get rid of Windows. I had a lot of buds before I even tried. Many years ago I gave chance myself few times as well. But now there is more and more reasons to get familiar with this stuff.

However.

I am trying to figure out witch distro will be the best for me.

So far I've tried Latest Mint, latest Ubuntu and Debian. All on my old Laptop (HP Compaq Presario 2100).
All of the distros has one issue. If system is doing NOTHING, consuming 40--60% of processor power. Making machine very unresponsive obviously.
What can be a reason? I did a test under my old PC (AMD 3200+) a bit better but still... up to 30%. More or less I know what is the Linux and how the architecture of this system works. But this seems to be common issue. And is not acceptable for me that machine consuming so much power on stand by mode. The only mid point is both machines are AMD powered. Is that can be a reason?

Thanks in advance.

It would help if you said which exactly program/process is using the 40-60% of CPU... run "top" from a terminal and it'll show you each process and how much CPU it is using individually.

typically, when nothing is happening you should have basically 0% overall CPU usage.

If you have compositing (3D desktop) enabled that's probably a prime candidate if your top CPU user is X.

Ok, it might be stupid... but actually I founded the processes list and checking it on Mint / System monitor. Those 60% of usage is gnome-system-monitor Gosh this is Athlon XP 2800+!

60% is a peak when moving cursor around. If not going down to 40%. It can be a driver problem?

EDIT:
OK I turned "Enable smooth refresh" off and now is up to 10%. Is a drawing a graph such a difficult task for performance monitor?

But this is nothing to compare to what happened next:
Processor went crazy up to 100%. in This same time processes looks normal. No matter witch machine.

I am loosing my faith in Linux when I see this kind of stuff.

Why not try a KDE-based version? Go ahead and get the Linux Mint 9 KDE RC ISO and try that out: http://www.linuxmint.com/blog/?p=1459

Personally, I've been running KDE-based distros(Kubuntu and now Mint) for over a year, had no real problems

Edit: Oh, and you can always PM me for help with Linux.

+1 for Debian based KDE distro. Personally, I've been using SimplyMepis for some time & it runs fine on systems with lower spec than those above here.