Hdd Working Slow

[gl556tr]

My HDD is more frequently huffing and a-puffing! The HDD activity lamp, after a while in use, starts flashing more often. Then this lamp remains on, barely blinking with the mouse-pointer frozen. More often than not, a message window appears asking whether I want to stop a script (I think that's the term) or continue. No matter my reaction, it is so slo-mo that I close the active window (usually Firefox) - have even resorted to turning my notebook off. Is this an indication that my HDD is about to give up the ghost? I have been regularly shovelling any downloaded data to my USB flash drive as a precautionary measure. __HDD is 2.5" on which I have Ubuntu 14.02 running.

[Buenchico]

>>>Is this an indication that my HDD is about to give up the ghost?

Probably not. It's far more likely that something is hogging all of the memory on your computer. (If Ubuntu can't find enough memory available it temporarily borrows spaces on your hard drive but that's far slower than using RAM, so it slows your computer down. If the lack-of-memory situation persists, you'll see continuous hard drive activity as Ubuntu keeps accessing it to find some available memory).

So you need to use an appropriate tool to find out what's hogging all of the memory on your computer. With Windows it's the Task Manager that you need but I'm unfamiliar with Linux-based operating systems so, regrettably, I'll have to bow out here and hope that you know (or can find out) how to analyse memory usage on your machine.

I'm sorry that I couldn't help more but I hope that I might have pointed you in the right direction anyway.

Merry Christmas!

[TTG]

Uninstall and reinstall firefox.

[pinkyboyid]

Assume that you have checked your Total HDisk usage and it is not full or has at least has a few GB free?

It's feasible that Firefox is causing the problem and a reinstall may provide the fix.

If not, Ubuntu includes a 'System Monitoring' application tool with which you can monitor a number of system resources and is very similar to the Microsoft Windows 'Task Manager'.

To start the 'System Monitor' from the Panel menu select:- System, Administration, System Monitor

A useful write up on how to use the tool can be found at: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/11/5-system-monitoring-tools-for-ubuntu

Initially check the CPU usage graph to see if it is frequently or constantly peaking at 100%. If so, then check each of the running Processes to determine which process is causing this condition.

A further possibility to consider is that there may be some corruption to the system files. To check this you could use a Ubuntu system program called 'fsck', but you do need to be very careful in its use. See the following: https://www.maketecheasier.com/check-repair-filesystem-fsck-linux/

Hope that helps.