System extremely slow under light load

[Bartosz Fabianowski]

>    I could be wrong, but in my experience this really sounds like it is
> a hardware problem with the cooling system, and a very serious one at
> that.  I would encourage you to take this up with Dell at once.

Yes, I will. They have exchanged a lot of components already though 
(including the whole laptop) and so far, nothing has helped.

>    While it's certainly possible that newer FreeBSD releases are failing
> to control the temperature as well as older ones due to some change,
> that does not mean that this is a FreeBSD problem - these temperatures
> are so far out of line that anything FreeBSD managed to do before
> should be viewed as an unexpectedly successful workaround.

This box has been running FreeBSD 8 since day one. It always had trouble 
with high temperatures. But now that summer is coming and ambient 
temperatures are rising, the issue keeps getting worse.

>    Apart from your immediate problems, in my past experience this range
> of CPU temperatures is likely to lead to early failure of the CPU, very
> likely within a year or less.

Yes, I am afraid that may happen. Then again, Intel's data sheet clearly 
states that this CPU is designed to operate at up to 100°C.

- Bartosz