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