Happy news: Upgrading to KDE-4.6.0 fixed all the annoying issues below.
Apparently, though unproven, at 00:54 on Wednesday 26 January 2011, Alan McKinnon did opine thusly: > Hi all, > > I'm not completely happy with my driver setup for an 8600M GT. > > Using nvidia.ko, KDE with desktop effects enabled (especially translucent > popup thumbnails on the task bar, and blur effect on) makes my notebook fan > run all the time and kwin uses 20% cpu according to top. Oddly enough, the > fan runs faster with the screensaver on (displaying a single static jpeg) > and settles down when I unlock the screen. > > Nouveau is supposed to be useable (if not entirely stable yet) but it makes > the fan run flat out, notebook gets hot very quickly, top reckons kwin is > using 30% cpu even with all fancy effects off and gui events have a > noticeable lag to them - a short but very noticeable delay after mouse > clicks for example. It all looks very much like some process is blocking > as when things get around to happening, they happen quickly - like > glxgears spins it's wheels at a terrific rate and very little gets in it's > way once it starts. > > I reckon it should not be this way and I have yet again done something > stupid. I've scoured the net and forums for howtos but found nothing and > this has been going on for at least 5 kernel versions. > > Are there any known issues that cause things like this that I've > overlooked? I strongly suspect it's not an obscure detail peculiar to me, > more like I absolutely need kernel feature X for best results. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
