There's always more information to give... :-)

It's a Dell Optiplex 960. Intel Core 2 Quad CPU @ 2.83GHz. 8Gb of RAM but some is stolen for the onboard video. 2x 300Gb SATA HDDs. And uname-a returns "2.6.32-25-generic #45-Ubuntu SMP Sat Oct 16 19:52:42 UTC 2010 x86_64 GNU/Linux". All the developers have machines like that, except almost everyone runs Vista or Windows 7. I have Vista in a VirtualBox for corporate networking, but I only really need it for the Outlook calendar.

The dirty_writeback_centisecs was 499, so I lowered it to 300.

Wade.