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On 04/12/17 18:37, Neil wrote: > My wife's laptop is still playing up. Today I had to reset it to get it > working. It does not exactly lock up, it just does not respond to the > mouse or the keyboard. When I reset it, it works OK for a while and then > starts playing up again. > > I am wondering if the HD is on the way out. Can anyone tell me what > signs to look out for please? Or are there some tests I can run? The > computer is nearly five years old, and it is used a lot. I am wondering > if, should there be a problem with the HD, it would be more sensible to > replace the HD, perhaps with a SSD, or to go for it and get a new computer. > > Any suggestions please? First things first, diagnose the current problem - even if you decide to splash on a new laptop you're still going to want to make the effort to try and fix the current one presumably. I guess you mean the GUI freezes and stops responding to all inputs when you say "sort of locks up"? There are a lot of other things you can physically check if this happens to gather clues: Is the hard disk activity light active? Is the network activity light active? Is the fan at full tilt/off/erratic? Is the laptop unreasonably hot? And so on. It may be that everything seems entirely normal and functional even when it locks up (which would be good news). Next: Can you switch to a different VT by pressing CTRL+ALT+Fx? Does an external (USB) keyboard respond? Does CTRL+ALT+DEL or CTRL+ALT+Backspace do anything? Does the Magic SysRq key work? (you may not have this setup) At the risk of sounding like a broken record, this is yet another reason why SSH should be installed and configured on every machine: rather than bother with any of the above, just try pinging and then SSHing to the laptop after it freezes instead. If it doesn't respond then it's a hard lock up: forcibly reboot and examine the logs. If it does you have a working system but a borked GUI and you can now proceed to diagnose and fix it over SSH. First port of call is either way is the syslog and Xorg.0.log, or journaltcl if your distro supports it. Report back with your findings! Cheers -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG https://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq