Re: PC Slowdowns and Lock-ups



On Thu, Dec 01, 2005 at 04:45:52PM +0000, James Caldow wrote:
>It is by no means a high spec computer, (Athlon 900MHz, 512Mb PC133 SDRAM, 80Gb
> Hard Drive, ATI Radeon 9250 128Mb Graphics Card), but as I say it has been
> running well for months now.

I am no expert on hardware failures, but you may consider cleaning the
dust out of your case. Try running the computer for a while with the
case open and see if the fans on the graphics card and CPU are spinning.

> I suspect it may have more to do with Hardware than the OS as I have also run
> Knoppix on it out of curiosity. It was equally slow.

Good idea. It does sound like a hardware problem. You didn't do any
major software changes, though, did you?

I have never tried them, but I know that there are many programs that
can diagnose hardware problems or at least make the hardware work
extremely hard and fail if it is defective.

Some words to search are memtest or mem86 and GIMPS (Great Internet
Mersenne Prime Search) torture test.


> The problems begin as soon as I am logged into the system. The cursor
> will move very, very slowly, if at all.

This sounds like a graphics card problem. Try turning off X and doing
something non-graphics intensive like compiling a kernel or running a
torture test for GIMPS.


Good luck.
--
Steven Wheelwright
sjwheel@xxxxxxxxx
It's never not now.
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