My SuSe installation locks up minutes after I boot. Currently, I'm just trying to recover some files before the system becomes useless.

I've never been able to pare down the possible causes of the problem. In the Linux forums I've looked at, nobody's been able to reliably replicate the problem.

Has anybody heard of this problem, or a solution? Maybe better, has anybody got any experience with a distro that runs solidly on an HP desktop, and can take advantage of a 64-bit AMD CPU? I think I'm pretty much done with SuSE -- 10.0 was bloated compared to earlier versions, and hell, years ago I was pretty happy with Redhat running fvwm.

sglover910,

You did not include the model of your laptop. SuSE 10.0 has been around quite a while. Could it be that you need a more up to date kernel to handle your hardware? Depending on your hardware, some of your problem might be there.
SuSE 10.1 certainly had some better features than 10.0, but you also have newer versions as well. I would try something newer, or switch to another distro, as you mentioned.

davesny

The Achilles heal of SuSE 10 was the update system which ran on mono and could easily swamp the system. It was replaced with zypper which is much better.

Running top or some of the similar programs may tell you whether a service is causing the problem.
Also look at the beagle service.