A friend who builds custom Linux boxes recently put one together for me. It has a 450 Celeron processor and 131 megs of ram. It is running Fedora Core 2. I had it a week then left for a 3 week vacation, then came back yesterday and tried, for the first time, to use it for serious work. I found that it crawls at a glacial speed and it crashes often, or near-crashes to the point where it becomes unresponsive to mouse and keyboard input. I rebooted several times without the trouble going away. The last time I rebooted, I simply logged in and double-clicked the icon "Start Here". The window opened, and then the computer began writing to its hard drive, with such intensity that it was not able to do much else. The mouse would only respond to movement once every 5 or 6 minutes. I decided to go away and make a sandwich and then I came back 45 minutes later and the computer was still writing to the hard drive with the same intensity and the mouse and keyboard were still unresponsive.

Any ideas what the trouble might be?

celeron 450 ?

what kind of 'serious work' do you think this old dodderer will do for you?

anyhow, here are some things to check that might reveal what or who has turned your machine into a zombie:


- run ' top ' in a console and have a look at the cpu and memory usage of your processes when that phenomenon occurs. if one is escpecially GREEDY you might try to kill it.

- check if this weird behaviour does occur in runlevel 3 as well (no Xwindows and memory hungry KDE)

- you might try disabling IDE-DMA

- get a knoppix cd and give it a try. see if your machine will do the same weird stuff.

and last but not least, check for cpu-temperature, cpu-fan, badly attached ide cables . . .

"celeron 450 ? what kind of 'serious work' do you think this old dodderer will do for you?"

Is that meant as some kind of macho challenge or what? If I was editing text files would that not be serious? It's serious to me.

I recall now that I downloaded and installed FireFox. That is when the trouble started, I think.

all I wanted to point out is that ANY 450MHz cpu combined with 128MB ram and KDE is not a good basis for relaxed and joyful work due to heavy usage of swapspace - which incredibly slows down the system - and lack of processing power.

With a lightweight windowmanager like wmaker or xfce that might be different.

I just hope you don't have to deal with openoffice on your machine. that's a cpu hog as well.

I would say get more RAM. My old Celeron 1.13 Ghz laptop crawls to a complete halt after its been on for 16 hrs. I can barely open a program after that long...and I have 256MB of RAM