Help: “aptd” is maxing out my CPU?

From what I could find here and here you have to do the following steps:

1. Kill apt-get and aptd process. Use killall -9 pid (where pid is the process id which you can find by running top). -9 is required to make sure the process is terminated.

2. Then you need to try

sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh -a and sudo dpkg --configure -a

3. (optional) If all of the above steps work on their own then you should be fine but I would recommend you update to a more recent version of ubuntu, because it appears it was a bug in the way apt-get worked and should've been removed completly in a more recent release. Maybe a simple apt-get update && apt-get upgrade is sufficient (and would be quite ironic!).