In the last few weeks, my laptop running Slack 9 has been having increasing problems. Boot time used to take about 2 minutes, now it can take up to 30. But the odd thing is, its not consistent. I just booted it this morning and it was fine, but yesterday it took 20 minutes for me to get a login prompt. There isn't any specific component thats failing either, the hard drive just operates Slower some days. Even LILO takes 30 seconds to load on these occasions, which is odd.

The other issue is that the hard drive will randomly start being 100% busy for no reason at all. I'll just be typing something and then my music will freeze, my typing will take 30 seconds to show up, and I can barely move the mouse. It can do this sometimes for hours on end.

The final problem, and this has only been in the last couple of days.. is that if I leave the computer alone and then come back to it, it will be dead. The screen is black and moving the mouse/pressing keys does nothing. I cant even turn it off by pushing the power switch.. I have to hold it for 8 seconds.

What should I do? I just need this machine to work.. all it needs to do is run gAIM, some form of text editor, and Samba (so it can serve my music to my network). I'm almost ready to backup, reformat, and go back to windows2000.

Any suggestions: greatly appreciated

I have had this happen to me before, one time it was the motherboard and another the heat sink was lose and the cpu was getting hot.

But this is a laptop.. I'm not sure how easily that could happen, or if I could fix it.

I'm with comprookie2000. I had an IBM Thinkpad T20 and I started having the same problems you're having now only winxp was installed. I checked my hardware which seemed fine. Then one it just would not come on anymore, I mean I get power lights but that's it. Sometimes I would wait a couple of hours and then it would come back on but now it does not work at all. I found that it was my motherboard but the price of a motherboard for a laptop is ridiculous so I just bought another laptop.



peace V

haha, lovely. ok, so I guess this isnt as simple a problem as I thought it might be. Well I guess I'll just use it as long as it will work then

if it was mine, I'd make sure I have all critical data backed up somewhere. if the HD light comes on and stays on for extended periods, it's probably doing retries.
see if you can turn on S.M.A.R.T. in the bios. it might report a problem. motherboards might be ridiculous, but HDs can't be that bad.

Thank you, yeah, I've been slowly backing up everything over the past few weeks. I've got everything I really need safely duplicated, but theres still 10 gigs of music that I dont have anywhere to put. I have a new harddrive coming any day now

The BIOS is corrupted somehow, or at least the GUI part of it is. This laptop is at least 5 years old, maybe older, at at some point I just started getting errors whenever I tried to enter the BIOS.