Ubuntu 10.04 on Toshiba Satellite P15-479

I've been using 10.04 on my eeePC & decided to upgrade the KRUU live remote laptop after installing a new harddisk. Unfortunately it was not as smooth as I had hoped so I'm taking notes of my finding.

The setup:

Toshiba Satellite P15-479
P4 2.0 Ghz
1GB RAM
60 GB HDD

The problem:

At first I was unable to boot the USB disk or CD. After several hard boots I tried to get it to reboot by repeatedly switching consoles (Ctrl + Alt + Fn1-12). To my surprise it booted. After Ubuntu started it appeared that the computer was freezing as the mouse & keyboard would become unresponsive for a period of time & then would resume functioning.

I didn't realize this but I actually ran into this issue before when trying to upgrade from 9.04 to 9.10 on my old eeePC. The upgrade started but "froze" in the middle but would continue if a key was repeatedly pressed.

The fix:

I looked at the following bugs which helped narrow the search down but weren't the final fix:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.22/+bug/96596
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/228624

Most of the info I found was pretty old & finally found the following about disabling the apic timing by adding noapic to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line in /etc/default/grub:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/ubuntu-63/keyboard-and-mouse-fre...

Update:

The internal wireless card is an Atheros based card which uses the ath5k driver. Even in 9.04 there was a problem with the card freezing network traffic which was also observed in 10.04. After the noapic option was added the wireless started to behave.