On Thu, 30 Mar, listrcv wrote: > N.Pauli wrote: > > All of a sudden my machine has become incredibly slow to boot up and to > > launch anything - boot up took over 5 minutes and launching an app like > > Mozilla or OpenOffice can take just as long. All the while > the harddisk drive light is burning constantly. It is as if there is some > process that never completes, takes a long time to time out and restarts > itself whenever I launch an app. Once I'm in, apps seem > to run fairly normally. I've looked at 'top' and can't see any culprit there. > I had this happen once before and it was solved by making sure that nothing > was plugged in to a usb port while booting up or > even logging on. The last significant things I have done prior to this > happening do a normal update and upgrade using Synaptic and install Liferea. > > Check out the syslog, there may entries about resetting the IDE bus or > sector errors of your disk drive. It sounds like a hardware problem. > > > GH > > I don't think it is hard disk - but please don't think I speak with either authority or conviction. Philippe de Rycke pointed me towards some HD inspection progs but they haven't turned up anything alarming yet - as far as I can see.
Thanks for your tip about syslog. I had a look at it and what I did find out was that something called gconf has star billing in syslog. I don't know what it does but it doesn't seem happy! Tomorrow I'll try to find out more about it - but in the meantime if anyone can tell me what and why it is I'd be dead chuffed. Nigel -- Nigel Pauli Network Manager St. John's School, Northwood -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
