I can't get around the frequent hanging (by which i mean screen unresponsive to mouse) in Mandriva2009.1
I've been taught to bail out via CtrlAltF1 instead of stomping it, but it's becoming unusably frequent, and I'd decided that I'll have a go at re-installing when I get my disc back.

But now it occurs to me that maybe if I upgraded to Mandriva 10, this might do the same thing as reinstal - or maybe I'll just be introducing a whole new bunch of variables????

I'm writing this with latest Ubuntu disk, I wouldn't prob have made it thru on the installed Mandy, which I do like.

KDE Gnome DELL Latitude 1.6Ghz 512Mb.

Upgrade probably will not fix your problem. Honestly it sounds more like a hardware problem than software.

Not sure if upgrading will solve this problem. If it's driver related it might. It's recommended to read through the release notes and errata before upgrading.

Did 'solve' it by installing over mandy with Ubuntu disk.

Maybe, next time, it would be wiser to identify what the problem is, instead of just using the old Windows way to "solve" the problem. If the performance degrades with usage, then you might have some serious issue that could range from a hardware problem, a configuration issue or even a rootkit or a similar critter using your box as a node to send spam all around the net, in which case your privacy could also be compromised, not to talk about potential problems and legal issues with your ISP.

I am painting the worst possible scenario of course, so you can make yourself an idea about what can happen when you ignore the real problem and just patch it.

I understand the crudity of my method, guboj, and thank you for explaining some of its serious disadvantages,
But... I did try hard, with a crippled interface, to "identify the problem", via LQ, Google, etc.but the relentless hanging made it impossible finally to hope for solving relentless hanging.

A stable system is a great idea, but an unstable system isn't a good tool for finding out how to stabilise it.

Maybe now that ubuntu is running smooth, I could search now for what it was, but I'd like to do something else with my computer sometimes apart from solve computer operation problems.

It's very tempting to just get some work done and forget about the endless tinkering and research

Maybe my ancient laptop needs to run DSLinux, I don't know.