I was trouble-shooting a problem with what was (is) excessive CPU usage on my Dell Mini 10 netbook. While looking for why the process called “background”, which is somehow related to the X.org implementation, someone mentioned that for those of you who use the command prompt regularly a good replacement for the top command is htop. It is curses based and allows you to use the arrow keys to go up and down the processes listed and then hit F9 to kill the task. No more typing in the PID (or in my case sometimes mis-typing the PID – damn small netbook keyboard 😉 ) of the task that you want to kill.
You can find more information and distributions at the htop page in sourceforge.