[TriLUG] My Dell Laptop is extremely slow

[Daniel Zhang]

My Dell Inspiron 1150 running Fedora 3 crashed recently and can't 
reboot. I did nothing before it crashed except I didn't shut down the 
machine for several days.
Then I try to reinstall OS but machine hangs there a couple of times.  
The error message includes possible hardware failure. Finally I barely 
reinstall it with the minimum packages but it runs like a tortoise.

Is that due to bad RAM(512 MB for this machine) or anything else? If so, 
how can I check RAM good or not? Thanks.

Daniel