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Re: [LUG] Laptop problem

 

On 04/12/17 19:27, mr meowski wrote:


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



Thanks for the suggestions. I will see what I can find out. There is a problem though. I have tried to SSH from my desktop to my laptop, just to see how it works. So far I have failed, it does not see the laptop. So I may not be able to SSH over to my wife's laptop. I suppose I could try team viewer.

Neil


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