Historical cpu consumption information?

[Wendell Nichols]

My fedora 10 laptop routinely "freezes".  That means the menu's and 
applications don't respond to mouse clicks.  After a few seconds (or 
sometimes many seconds) it frees up and works normally again.  If I look 
at the cpu consumption graph I can see that something had the processer 
pegged at 100% but what?  during the episode there is no way to switch 
to top or the ksysguard process list because the system is 
unresponsive.  So how do I find out what caused the lockup?
wcn