I made a persistent USB flash drive and installed a few programs. I setup a "Minecraft Server" just to see if I could do it so I needed to install JDK 7. Got the server running and joined the server from another computer (local network) and had my nerd achievement moment.

At this point all is still good. Have no idea if any of this contributed to the problem.

Now that I have this working "Minecraft Server", I figured I'd try it out on one of my older computers hooked up to a new Dell 1920x1080 monitor. This is the first time running the Knoppix persistent USB flash drive on this hardware.

I boot up the system and notice I have no video. I force the computer down and boot up again and use a cheat code to set the resolution of 1280x1024. This time I booted up with video and was getting ready to start the server when I noticed the performance meter in the lower left corner was solid green. Normally after boot-up it flat lines pretty quickly. So I thought I'd give it a minute. Then gave it a few minutes. The CPU never settled down. Thinking it had something to do with this older and slower computer I shut it down and called it a night.

This morning I booted up with the Knoppix persistent USB flash drive on my day-to-day fast computer to try out some software and that same problem persists. On my faster computer, performance meter in the lower left corner was a solid 80% for about a minute then lowered to about a solid 40% but never settled down.

I have a feeling the cheat codes hose the persistent USB flash install. It changes something instead of only existing for that session.

Another time I hosed the persistent USB flash install was when I used the cheat codes to try the different desktops available (kde, gnome, icewm, etc). It seemed like the persistent USB flash install got worse with each desktop I tried. It got to a point where their was no option to shut down and all I could do was log-out but then just logged me back in. I hit the power button bring up a shutdown option.