2 things to do as a bit of a prelimanary check easiest way is to use another machine to ssh into the one you want to look at then run top to see whats eating cpu cycles/ram and use tail /var/log/syslog -f to see if anything is being reported to the system log (ctrl + c to exit) Sean Breheny wrote: > One more question: I have a slight suspicion that the problem may be a > malfunctioning hard drive. How do I run diagnostics on the hard drive > and file system in Ubuntu? > > Thanks, > > Sean > > > On Sat, Jul 26, 2008 at 9:38 PM, Sean Breheny wrote: > >> Hi all, >> >> I have a Toshiba laptop (Celeron M processor, 1.5GHz, 512MB ram, 80GB >> hard drive) on which I recently installed Ubuntu Hardy Heron (I >> originally had XP on it, I wiped it clean and installed Ubuntu). At >> first it seemed to work wonderfully. However, in the last several >> weeks, it will often take forever to do the simplest tasks. For >> example, playing a Youtube video in Firefox, it will often halt for a >> few seconds several times during the video, despite the fact that it >> has buffered the data well beyond the point where it is in the video. >> Also, when I am just opening files from the hard drive (PDF, XLS, even >> text), it will often sit there for perhaps even several minutes while >> the hard drive chugs away before it finally opens the file. It often >> does this while loading web pages, too. Most of these times the >> display will go "grey" and become unresponsive until it finishes >> chugging, and then it will go back to full color and work normally. >> Sometimes it will stay grey indefinitely and I will have to kill the >> Firefox process. >> >> I am not a Linux expert but I was able to use pidstat to see what >> processes were using the hard drive so much. In the cases where >> Firefox was active and very slow, it was Firefox itself which was >> doing a whole lot of reading from the HD (surprisingly, it was doing >> almost no writing to the HD). >> >> I installed one round of Ubuntu updates a few weeks ago and it didn't >> help. Now I see that more updates are available and I will try those. >> >> Searching on Google hasn't turned up anything for me yet. >> >> Any ideas? >> >> Thanks, >> >> Sean >> >> -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist