my computer wasn´t this slow before.
but lately, i´d guess, because of the recent improper shutdowns the computer has suffered, the computer has not been working as it had used to.
pressing the buttons upon the taskbar or in the start menu to have a program load, only to have to wait five minutes for something as small as a Gedit editor program to load is frustrating and time consuming.
thus i petition the experts upon this board to help me with this problem i am facing. i know almost nothing concerning Linux, though i have had experience utilizing Linux for almost a year now :\
so i would like help in bringing back to order my computer. helping it become as fast as it was before.
what is the problem (and the solution) so that i may fix it?

thank-you very much.

k.

Use the command "top" to get a listing of the processes that are using the most resources. It's possible that you've just a runaway processes, which is slowing everything else down. -- J.W.

Welcome to LQ!

also wouldn't hurt to reboot and fsck... to do that (as root):

shutdown -rF now

what distro are you using?? what filesystem??

what's your hard disk performance look like?? to test:

hdparm -Tt /dev/hdx

Does the machine show bad response times with
all programs, or is is it prominently in X/gnome apps?

If the latter is the case you may have lost the
/etc/hosts
localhost entry, and the machine could be trying
to communicate with itself (X is a network transparent
client-server system after all) via lookups over
your ISP (which is particularly hard if you're
disconnected and the resulting time-outs would
explain the 5 minute-delay).

Also make sure that /etc/host.conf
has "order hosts, bind" in it...


Cheers,
Tink

also try the "ps" command, which has a few options to look at running processes

yeah it works now. thanks a bunch y´all. the /etc/hosts thing was busted.

k.

Congratulations ;)

Cheers,
Tink

I'm absolutely certain I had that problem ages ago. I could not understand why my machine seemed to ignore me for minutes at a time before launching applications, even though the cpu and the disk did not seem to be active at all. I wish I had known this then! At the time my isp was giving me a dodgy service (v. long latency) so this exacerbated the problem. But that was two distro changes ago and the problem hasn't resurfaced.