[TriLUG] My Dell Laptop is extremely slow

[Liyun Yu]

Daniel Zhang wrote:

> 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

All DELL computer shipped with a cd titled as "Drivers & Utilities".
(Subtitle said "Already installed on your computer")
It is a bootable CD. You may run that CD and use the extensive test
button to test your hardware. That should give you more information on
what went wrong. After the test, you may either click on the customize
button or symptom summary button to see the reports. DELL did not
have output option ( at least I know of) from the test CD therefore you
might have to take notes when call DELL support.

Liyun