So far this beast has behaved itself for 3 days.  Today I handbrake on a 
tv show episode I have on dvd. It's a 30 minute show and Handbrake 
normally takes about 20 minutes to encode a 30 minute show.  This time I 
noticed the estimation of how long it would take hovered around 45 
minutes.  I then opened top and pressed 1 once it started.  It showed 
only cpu0.  Shouldn't cpu1 also be there?  I looked around online and 
found that using the noapic option in grub only allows one core of a 
multi core processor to run.  Is there any way to enable apic and lapic 
if necessary without it causing my machine to lock up again?

Thanks

-- 
"I get my copy of the daily paper, look at the obituaries page, and if I’m not there, I carry on as usual."

Patrick Moore