I looked around before asking this and no one seemed to have this particular problem...

I have an Inspiron 8200 with Slack 9.1 and version 2.4.22 of the kernel running on it. Everything boots up fine and generally, 99.5% of the time, everything is beautiful. Every once in a while, and I haven't determined that there is a pattern involved here, everything will freeze, the mouse, keyboard, the display, gkrellm, all of it. I sit patiently and after about 7-8 seconds, whatever was locking everything down releases it and the laptop now functions normally.

This doesn't happen after any particular event (such as boot up or KDE logon). I'll just be working away and won't even notice until my moving the mouse gets no response from the on-screen cursor.

I've checked over the /var/log/syslog and /var/log/messages for any indication that there might be a boot-up problem, but nothing stands out.

Any thoughts?

"Every once in a while, and I haven't determined that there is a pattern involved here, everything will freeze,"

If you are short of memory you may have a swapping problem. You can use the free command now and then to monitor what swap is doing. Just type in:
free

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Steve Stites

Thanks for the suggestion, jailbait, but we can probably rule out a shortage of memory. Generally I try to keep at least 150-200 MB free of physical RAM (I have 512 MB of physical RAM). Plus, I've endured hard drive thrashing before when pages are being swapped from disk to memory (and vice versa) and this doesn't feel like that. The whole system freezes up (no hard disk activity at all). I also monitor my swap partition using gkrellm and I almost never have to dip into it (unless I'm doing lots of work with digital photos).