lowering hits to processor

[Susan Cragin]

Hello, 
I don't have a problem, really, but am looking for suggestions or comments. 
I have two programs running: EMACS, and Dragon NaturallySpeaking (under wine). And that's all.  
NatSpeak has a high resource consumption, and then of course there's wine.... sigh... which sometimes seems to compete for resources with running Linux programs, sometimes just stalls on its own. 
This is probably mostly a wine problem. But I do what I can to help out: I have a fast machine with a solid-state drive and plenty of RAM, I have installed Lubuntu with the low-latency kernel, and disabled the zeitgeist logger. I don't open any programs I don't need. 
Any suggestions? Any other daemons I can axe? I need pulseaudio, sadly. 
Susan Cragin