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A strategy for dealing with a flaky computerA strategy for dealing with a flaky computerPosted Oct 15, 2009 13:02 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304)Parent article: A strategy for dealing with a flaky computer
If you see something consuming insane amounts of CPU time and you can't figure out why, your first solution should really be to install the debugging symbol packages for the malefactor, kick up sysprof or the perf tools or something like that, and see where it's spending its time, then google for that and post queries in the appropriate places (distro bug reports, upstream, whatever).
Just reinstalling the distro and hoping it goes away teaches you nothing about the cause of the problem: if it recurs, you'll be just as much at sea as you were before.
Honestly, this is a Windows user's solution. Remember 'retry, reboot, reinstall'? There's a reason longtime Unix users treat that attitude with more than a smidgen of contempt...
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A strategy for dealing with a flaky computer Posted Oct 19, 2009 20:46 UTC (Mon) by cook (subscriber, #4) [Link]
I did try a number of different approaches to fixing the problem
before doing a new system install, the machine was simply too important to me to spend any more time messing around finding a solution. I still have the old system disk around, although I have very little motivation to try to debug it now that I have a well-functioning system with a newer version of Ubuntu. Sometimes the Windows "wipe and reload" method is the right solution.
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