On Fri, Jan 06, 2012 at 06:22:38AM -0800, Rich Shepard wrote: > We have a Toshiba Satellite laptop about 2-3 years old that is heavily used > every day. Most used application is a Web browser (Seamonkey) accessing > facebook and gmail. The system keeps locking up by becoming completely > unresponsive for several minutes at a time. When switching to a different > virtual desktop it takes a long time for the screen to display.
What does the HDD light look like when the computer is unresponsive? Solid-on, solid-off, mostly-on, mostly-off? First guess is HDD thrashing, either due to lots of swapping, or due to no swapfile (weird, but that's how it is.) I would keep "top" running in an xterm or console, and take a look when the latop gets unresponsve. Hit "M" to sort by RAM usage, and watch the Mem and Swap used/free numbers, as well as buffers. Lots of used swap and not much buffers means too much RAM in use. If you can't get to the "top" screen in time, look at the "load average" immediately afterwards. If it's simple swap-thrashing, it might be something like 2.0 5.0 1.0 (or a multiple of that), where the 1st number (1-minute average) is medium-high but falling, the 2nd number (5-minute) is pretty high, and the 3rd number (15-minute) is fairly low. Second guess is HDD problems. Install smartmontools and run "sudo smartctl -A /dev/sda" to see if there are lots of bad/relocated sectors or if the drive thinks it's failing. Laptop HDDs and RAM are fairly cheap these days (even if you don't buy at FreeGeek.) And there's a Linux Clinic in a week, even! _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
