[SWLUG] Machine hanging

[Mark Henderson]

Evening all,

Bit of a strange issue, I can't seem to get to the bottom of it, so I'm  
looking for a bit of help:

I upgraded my main desktop PC (Sempron 2400, 512MB RAM) from Slack 9 to  
Slack 12 a few months ago. I did a complete wipe/reformat/reinstall of  
/dev/hda1, didn't bother even trying the upgrade path. Since then, I've  
managed to iron out pretty much all the issues, apart from two:

The main issue is that it seems to hang, periodically. It's not a  
now-it-works-now-its-frozen hang, it's almost a gradual degradation:

It'll be working fine, usually in XFCE4 (although did also happen in KDE)  
and then it will start to get a little sluggish and I'll no longer be able  
to open/close windows or launch any apps. If I CTRL+ALT+F[2-6] I can enter  
in a username, but when I hit return, the password prompt doesn't appear.  
If one of those consoles is already logged in, I can type a command but it  
won't execute. If I go to TTY1, where I usually launch XFCE from, I can  
CTRL-C which will sometimes force a quit of the WM, but I'll still be  
unable launch any apps. Sometimes, in the middle of this, it will simply  
all lock up and I'll have to hard reset. As there's nothing I can do at  
this point (including trying to SSH in from my laptop) I have to hard  
reset anyway.

I've no idea what's causing this - I can't isolate any single app running  
that's causing this to happen. When I'm in TTY1, there's no errors  
reported from XFCE or any app that would appear to be causing it, either.  
Help?

Secondly, occasionally, when I boot up, the keyboard (a bog-standard PS2  
effort that's never had any issues before) will not respond. To avoid hard  
resetting, to reboot and get it back, I can log in as normal with my  
laptop using ssh. Is this a hardware failure or something else weird going  
on?

Any help with either of these is appreictaed - they've got me stumped!

Cheers,
Mark

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