Re: Incredibly slow to boot - any ideas?
On Thu, 30 Mar, listrcv wrote:
> N.Pauli wrote:
> > All of a sudden my machine has become incredibly slow to boot up and to launch anything - boot up took over 5 minutes and launching an app like Mozilla or OpenOffice can take just as long. All the while
> the harddisk drive light is burning constantly. It is as if there is some process that never completes, takes a long time to time out and restarts itself whenever I launch an app. Once I'm in, apps seem
> to run fairly normally. I've looked at 'top' and can't see any culprit there. I had this happen once before and it was solved by making sure that nothing was plugged in to a usb port while booting up or
> even logging on. The last significant things I have done prior to this happening do a normal update and upgrade using Synaptic and install Liferea.
>
> Check out the syslog, there may entries about resetting the IDE bus or
> sector errors of your disk drive. It sounds like a hardware problem.
>
>
> GH
>
>
I don't think it is hard disk - but please don't think I speak with either authority or conviction. Philippe de Rycke pointed me towards some HD inspection progs but they haven't turned up anything alarming yet - as far as I can see.
Thanks for your tip about syslog. I had a look at it and what I did find out was that something called gconf has star billing in syslog. I don't know what it does but it doesn't seem happy! Tomorrow I'll try to find out more about it - but in the meantime if anyone can tell me what and why it is I'd be dead chuffed.
Nigel
--
Nigel Pauli
Network Manager
St. John's School, Northwood
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