2.5.50 responsiveness

Fetched Solaris 9 CDROM images yesterday, unpacked, copied, etc.
Manipulating these 600+ MB files totally kills the machine
(with 256 MB memory). Keystrokes are reacted to after half a minute.
It is impossible to use the mouse since the kernel is too slow
to accept mouse packets within its self-imposed timeout, so that
the logs are full of
psmouse.c: Lost synchronization, throwing 1 bytes away.
psmouse.c: Lost synchronization, throwing 3 bytes away.
psmouse.c: Lost synchronization, throwing 1 bytes away.
psmouse.c: Lost synchronization, throwing 3 bytes away.
The clock lost somewhat over 10 minutes.

This is really primitive behaviour.

Andries

[everything vanilla - no settings changed, no hdparm used]