Hi,

I've been using Linux for about half a year now-- MDK as of late-- but my system has gone totally crazy. While running KDE, if I left it idle for awhile, the whole system would hang. Soon after that, the system would get incredibly slow on the most basic things like... opening Mozilla or OOffice.

I formatted and things were okay for awhile, but I plugged my soundcard and tvtuner in. The NIC stopped working and then the system hanged again. And now it wont boot

Also, my HD is only abt half a year old but it makes all these lovely clicking noises- I suspect that may be part of the problem.

Oh, and one last thing. My keyboard (PS2) doesnt work in Windoze-- even right off the Windoze installation CD... but when I use a USB keyboard, everything is okay. Whats going on!?!

Here's my specs:

MDK 10/Win XP
Asus A7V600-X w/ 2600+ XP
512 Kingston RAM
200 GB Hitachi IDE HD
Leadtek WinFast 2000XP Deluxe
some crappy PCI soundcard

oh also- i tested the RAM in memtest 86 overnight - no errors

the same problems occur in WinXP, so I'm thinking its def. hardware

If your hard drive is making clicking noises, I'd say that it's giving you fair warning that it's about to die. I'd suggest backing up all your important data immediately, and then replace the drive.

As for the system hanging, that's more difficult to diagnose. If your RAM seems OK, I'd ask whether your machine might be overheating, or if you are overclocking your CPU. To be honest though I'd worry more about the disk drive at this stage than the system hanging. Good luck with it -- J.W.