I'd really love a hardware way to make the top CPU/system hogs all get either renice'd and/or startup an xterm. I occasionally find that I have something going on and the system suddenly slams to a crawl because tracker, and/or some background script and/or some other thing all decide they want to run at the same time. I'd really like to be able to hit a button and nice/pause everything and then be able to manually restart the tasks when I'm done with whatever I'm doing.

And yes, I've configured tracker to only run when on mains, and the software updater to only run once a year, and, and.... But sometimes it just all decides it wants to all run at the same time regardless and the whole thing comes to a crawl. Usually when I'm doing something super critical, like driving when it's acting as my GPS, or when I start up the camera to take a picture...