On Fri, Jul 07, 2006 at 02:24:12PM -0400, Michael Marsh wrote: > On 7/7/06, Andrew Sackville-West <andrew@farwestbilliards.com> wrote: > >On Fri, Jul 07, 2006 at 01:36:52PM -0400, Michael Marsh wrote: > >> I actually had a suspiciously similar problem recently. A couple of > >> times, everything just froze. The power button was the only thing > >> that would respond. memtest86+ showed no problems. I figured it > >> might be a bad block in swap, so I ran the START self-diagnostics on > >> the drive. The only effect that had was to do something bad to the > >> drive R/W head, reminding me that I really should be doing backups. > >so IOW, don't do that? ;) > > YMMV. I'm guessing it was a coincidence caused by the combination of > a 4-year-old drive and a heavy access pattern. note to self, backup now. > > >I haven't been using start much, but it looks pretty okay to my > >untrained eyes. The disks are old though. but again, it doesn't happen > >in situations where i'd be swapping. blah. its frustrating. and > >unpredictable which is probably the worst part. > > I'm *always* swapping on my laptop (which sounds really bad out of > context), since my 256MB of RAM is taken up almost entirely by firefox > and thunderbird. And that's before loading any pages. Once I > resurrect the thing I'll pick up a SODIMM to boost the physical RAM, > which should also make it peppier. > definitely. what environment are you running in? my desktop using 256 megs rarely swaps. my usual setup is firefox, gnucash and mutt always running. When I pull up openoffice I'll start swapping, but not always. all this run under xfce, which seems pretty lightweight. I'd guess you're using gnome or kde? or is tbird really that big? regardless, you might find a lighterweight desktop is helpful on that laptop. A
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