Hi. This really baffles me: since yesterday my system slows down to a crawl every 30 secs to every 20 min, usually starting about 10 min after boot. And I mean scrawl: I have to wait for typed characters to appear on the screen. I think it gets worse with system uptime. 'top' shows no unusual activity, hdparm -tT however shows a huge altitude in 'buffered disk reads' from 20 MB/s (the usual) down to 13 MB/s. And there's nothing running except for X, WindowMaker, 2 terms and Postfix! No probs before with exactly the same configuration. No kernel change. Some specs: Mandrake 7.0 on an IBM U�W disk, controlled by a Tekram U�W 390. Celery 466 on an Asus P3BF mainboard, graphics card is a Matrox G400 Marvel. There is also an ISDN card, a Soundblaster and a ne2000 network card (all pci). Phenomena which might be related: imwheel doesn't work anymore and power off on shutdown only sometimes (this for quite a while now). Rebooting the machine usually fails, since the monitor won't initialize. I have to turn the machine off and on again to reboot (since a few days). Windows 98 (which lives on an IDE disk) lags when showing DVDs (also since yesterday). So it might not be the SCSI HD (which is fairly new). Has someone here encountered this, or has some idea what to do to narrow down the source of the problem? G*d, I wish I could get rid of this crappy x86 stuff :-\. Someone to donate an Alpha? ;) Thanks and regards tom -- Thomas 'tom' Berger, [EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.mandrakeuser.org/ "Outside? Outside what?" (http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20000612&mode=classic) All advice provided without warranty of any kind. I *may* be wrong ...
