I’m transfering a 700MB file from my notebook to my desktop. While I do that, my desktop is not able to open a text file on GEDIT, open shells, or load xpdf to open a pdf I downloaded from the net. On the other hand, firefox and pidgin open an close just fine.

I would think that the disk access load would either block everything from running, or not block everything, or even block resource-heavy firefox while letting me open terminal windows. This behavior is quite peculiar. I’m pretty sure there must be some reasonable explanation for it that I’m not seeing.