Last week, I mentioned that upgrading to Leopard caused considerable slowness on my Quicksilver Mac. I also mentioned that I couldn't even successfully install without removing my third-party SCSI card. As it turns out, the two were related.

I got curious yesterday about the slowness and checked to see what my CPU was doing, wondering if it was processor related or I/O related, and found that my CPU was running at 100% solidly. Well that meant there was something taking up a lot of CPU and I was pretty sure I wasn't running it. Top showed me a process named kernel_task that was using anywhere from 80% to 95% of the cpu, basically whatever I wasn't using elsewhere.

A quick google showed some forum entries from when Tiger was released indicating that the kernel_task process could take up CPU time on some PowerBooks with a bad trackpad driver and that replacing the driver with a third-party utility did the trick. Now these folks were complaining about 16% CPU going to kernel_task and that was nothing like what I was seeing, but it made me think about the fact that I hadn't installed any drivers for my SCSI card and hadn't needed to since 10.1 came out.

I don't really use my SCSI card. It's only there for my back catalog of Zip disks, and I can't remember the last time I put one in. My G3 Wallstreet has SCSI built in, so if I ever want to get rid of the old Zips I can copy them off and stick all the contents on a CD some time. One less SCSI card later, and my Quicksilver is running about as well as it was before the upgrade.

I'm still looking at the new Xeons though. 

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