my computer keeps on hanging
 

two months ago i bought a fujitsu siemens pc (pentium 4)and installed ubuntu 8.04. initially the computer was very slow and you couldnt run many applications at once, in the end it just becomes very slow and even hangs. it could take years to open open office word processor, so i thought it had a problem with the RAM. it initially had a RAM of 256MB, so i bought another 256MB and made it 512. it started to work very fast and it could open word so fast, i could run many applications at once until recently when it began to hang again even when there is only one application running, but it still is very fast, though it hangs often, is there a solution for this problem? i am oftenly forced to restart the machine and its boring, please help me out

hi ifranklin,

Try a memory test first, just in case one of the modules has developed a fault. This can happen anytime, even with new modules. Memtest86 can be downloaded free, and is also on the boot menu of several popular Linux distros.

If that's okay, do a test of the hard drive. I know it's only a couple months old, but frequent hanging can be a symptom of a HDD starting to go down. Worth a try, anyways.

Hi,

memtest86+ is a good memory tester which is based on memtest86 v3.0, and provides an up-to-date version of this useful tool, which aims to be as reliable as the original.

UBCD Ultimate Boot CD allows users to run floppy-based diagnostic tools from most CDROM drives on Intel-compatible machines, no operating system required. The CD includes many diagnostic utilities.

SystemRescueCd is a Linux system on a bootable CD-ROM for repairing your system and recovering your data after a crash. It aims to provide an easy way to carry out admin tasks on your computer, such as creating and editing the partitions of the hard disk. It contains a lot of system utilities (parted, partimage, fstools, ...) and basic tools (editors, midnight commander, network tools). Look at the Online-Manual.

Just a few links from Tools, Recovery, Diagnostic, Emergency section of 'Slackware-Links'. More than just Slackware® links!
:hattip:

I would also check the logs at '/var/log/messages' and syslog.