Have you tried running Memtest86? Good way to determine if it is a hardware RAM issue. I usually run at least 2 passes with any new RAM purchase to make sure they aren't duds (DOA, or static shock or etc). MemTest isn't perfect but it can catch a number of problems.
---------- Matt M. LinuxKnight On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 12:19 PM, John Jason Jordan <[email protected]>wrote: > My Thinkpad T61 had two 1-GB sticks in it for a couple of years. Last > November I replaced them with two brand new 2-GB sticks. > > Everything continued to work fine until this morning. Suddenly > everything was running very slow. I was unable to send a 40 MB PDF file > to a printer, even with the cp command. The System > Administration > > System Monitor GUI and top did not show anything unusual, except that > xorg would cycle up and down between 7-8% CPU and 50-60%. I had been > using Xsane quite a lot over the previous 24 hours, so I suspected a > memory leak. I did free at the command line and it appeared that all > four GB were used up and I was into the 4 GB swap partition. > > I started trying to repair the problem by shutting down all running > programs, starting with Xsane. Nothing helped. Eventually I rebooted. > And when X tried to come up I got that endless loop between the nVidia > splash screen and a command line. (I've seen this before on occasion, > althopugh I don't recall if it was my computer or someone else's at the > Clinic.) I couldn't get it to stop the looping long enough to take an > Alt-F1 command, so I rebooted again in recovery mode, and then got a > root command line. > > All I did at the command line was switch /etc/X11/xorg.conf from the > nVidia driver to the nv driver by editing it with nano. Then I rebooted > to the normal boot option. When it came up it took forever, but > eventually X came up, I got a login prompt, and here I am back with a > functioning computer (sans nVidia driver). > > Side comment: This time the nVidia splash screen did not come up, so I > assume I'm using the nv driver. However, I know that when someone is > using the nVidia driver the text in the login boxes will be very large. > When using the nv driver the username and password asterisks will > appear much smaller. OK, this time I did not get the nVidia splash > screen, but I did get the supersized text. Not sure what that means. A > command to find out which driver I'm actually using at the moment would > be helpful. > > But here is the real issue. The computer is running, but it takes way > too long for stuff to happen. Just opening a terminal window takes 30 > seconds, where it should pop up in three or four seconds. > > Here is what I get for memory usage: > > j...@devil7:~$ free > total used free shared buffers > cached Mem: 3988812 3964632 24180 0 > 16844 2912324 -/+ buffers/cache: 1035464 2953348 > Swap: 3903752 2320 3901432 > > I do not know how to read the above. It appears that it is using all 4 > GB or RAM and also some of the swap. Yet I just rebooted. The only > thing that is running is the terminal window and Sylpheed (mail > client). If it is using that much RAM, something is seriously wrong. > > Suggestions needed! > _______________________________________________ > PLUG mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug > _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
