I wish I could say that this magical trick work, but actually, I'm not sure! I finally got it to change the value (I chose -9 instead of -10), but actually the problems seemed to resolve itself before I made that change. I'm not an IT guy, but I can and have copied others' Unix code into terminal with some success. There was a slight hitch for me this time in that the line: ps -fl -C xxxx. returned two different lines with two different process ids. It turns out that the first one was the proper one to use. However, things seemed to speed up BEFORE I successfully made this change, simply by logging out, logging in as root, then logging that out and going back to my usual login. Very strange. Can you tell me: Now that I've changed the value to -9, is that permanent, or will it revert at some point? I'm trading in my MacBook Pro. Will I have to do it again, or do the settings carry over when you follow Apple transfer procedures?