Re: how to detect laptop hardware/drive problems?

[Scott Gifford <sgifford@suspectclass.com>]

Tyler <tyler.smith@mail.mcgill.ca> writes:

> I have noticed that my laptop is starting to slow down quite
> noticeably, although irregularly so. Basic tasks like opening xterm in
> fluxbox sometimes take a few seconds or more, and there's even a
> noticeable delay with command line stuff like ls. Not always, usually
> after I've been running for awhile (hours). I also notice that
> sometimes my harddrive seems to 'rev' (spin for a second, pause, spin
> for a second, pause, repeated continuously over a minute or more),
> even when I'm not doing anything (just reading documents in xpdf or a
> browser window.
>
> Maybe this is just normal for a laptop, but I don't know. Is there
> some way to check to see if I'm having any non-trivial hardware issues?

For monitoring, look at smartsuite, lm-sensors, and possibly hdparm.
For diagnosing problems, see badblocks for disks, and memtest86.  Most
of these are available from apt-get, and you should be able to find
more details with a quick search.

Good luck!

---Scott.