Everything works . . . just 50x slower

butters

The strangest thing just happened to my laptop (266 MHz PII Dell Latitude CPi). It was idle for several days, then I opened it to find it frozen. After a while of unsuccessfully trying to switch to a console and killing the X server with CTRL-ALT-Backspace, the screen got currupted then I hard rebooted it.

Then it would try to load grub, and seem to hang forever. So I reboot and the same thing happens. So I boot knoppix. It seems to work fine until it says scanning hard disks for partitions and creating /etc/fstab. I thought I definitely had a hard drive failure, but when I came back to the machine it was booted.

Then I rebooted and tried the gentoo install again. I let it sit, and eventually (and I mean, about half an hour later!!) it was booted. I took another 10 minutes to get to the xdm login, and then almost 5 minutes to start fluxbox. Everything works, just much slower than it ever has in the past. Anyone know what can cause this?
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out'fdabox · Posted: Sat Jul 19, 2003 4:50 am Post subject:

Did the cache get disabled somehow ? Check the BIOS.
Also check if your cpu speed is set correctly.
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drakonite · l33t Joined: 02 Nov 2002 Posts: 768 Location: Lincoln, NE

It's possible you may have overheated and damaged part of your laptop.

Laptops are known for having inadequate cooling, and from the stories I've heard Dell laptops seem to have more than their share of heat related problems.

Even though a 266 PII doesn't generate a lot of heat. I'm guessing it's not a mobile PII (which has substantially less heat). But even a 266 PII could generate enough heat to damage the cache or some other component of an inadequatly cooled laptop if left on long enough.

I don't know for sure if it's the problem but it's definately a possibility.
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butters · Posted: Sun Jul 20, 2003 4:11 am Post subject:

It appears that, although dma was working fine on this hard drive previously, it now breaks things. hdparm -i says that this drive supports udma2, which it had been set to previously. Now hdparm -t times out on dma if it is enabled. I am getting really slow buffered disk reads, from 100Kbps to 5Mbps, mostly between 500Kbps and 1Mbps.

I guess this means the drive is about to die . . . farewell to my first and only laptop :(
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aethyr · Veteran Joined: 06 Apr 2003 Posts: 1085 Location: NYC

You can buy new laptop harddrives:

http://www.pricewatch.com/menus/m101.htm

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=ibm+laptop+harddrives

Seems like that might be better idea than trashing your laptop. Mind you, you could probably buy another 266mhz laptop for the price of some of those HDDs, so I'd choose wisely.