As you may know, apart from my main super-computer, I have a ten year old Acer Netbook that always freezes within ten minutes of turning it on. After a decade of trying to find ways of getting it to work, I have, tonight, discovered that the best method seems to be sitting one of my huge Poundland fans slap bang on top of the keyboard and blasting freezing cold air at it.

Why this works, I have no idea, as it wasn't getting hot in the first place. It was merely getting warm. Why would moderate warmth make it freeze?

You could keep it in the fridge when not in use.

Or open the door and sit halfway in the fridge and browse the WWW amidst the pots of yoghurt and shrivelled spring onions.

I've now run MemTest86 on it to see if there's anything wrong with the RAM cards.

MemTest86 says both cards are fine.

This leaves me still clueless as to what the problem is.

Perhaps I need to put thermal paste on the CPU?

I wonder where the CPU is?

I shall watch a video on YouTube.

My decade-old Iomega 500gb EXTNRL MiniMax HD has just unceremoniously died.

I wouldn't mind if it didn't have over 6 months worth of meticulously gathered music on it.

You could try it on another computer, giving it time to cool down, time to warm up, or putting in the freezer then trying it again, I've tried that with a couple of hard drives that had failed.

Never worked of course. But there you go.

I've just upgraded my laptop to Ubuntu 18.04.

It won't boot up now

I'm having to replace it with Lubuntu 16.04 from an old USB install I had lying around.

Of the Linuxes I've tried recently, I give my approval to Mint, Linux Lite, Lubuntu and LXLE.

On the other hand, Puppy seems to be an instrument of Satan.

Lubuntu is good, I have it on my desktop computer on which I am currently typing.

And installing it on the laptop worked too.

The Call of the Wendigo wrote:

As you may know, apart from my main super-computer, I have a ten year old Acer Netbook that always freezes within ten minutes of turning it on. After a decade of trying to find ways of getting it to work, I have, tonight, discovered that the best method seems to be sitting one of my huge Poundland fans slap bang on top of the keyboard and blasting freezing cold air at it.

Why this works, I have no idea, as it wasn't getting hot in the first place. It was merely getting warm. Why would moderate warmth make it freeze?

I've now discovered that, most of the time when it's been freezing, it's not been frozen at all. It's just that the touchpad has stopped working. When I plug a mouse in, it works fine.

There appears to be no way in Lubunto to adjust the touchpad settings. Now I'm going to have to try a different operating system to see if I can fix it with that.

Nightjar wrote:

My decade-old Iomega 500gb EXTNRL MiniMax HD has just unceremoniously died.

I wouldn't mind if it didn't have over 6 months worth of meticulously gathered music on it.

I downloaded a thing called TestDisk and plugged my EHD (NJ 5000) in and, without the programme actually doing anything (other than open up the Terminal), it sputtered, stuttered and... started whirrin' and-a spinnin' away in a slightly poorly way.

So I plugged in my other EHD (NJ 9000) and began a four hour copypasta job.

And...

And when I read your story I immediately remembered to do my weekly backup to my on-site backup HD. I also have an off-site backup HD which, as the name suggests, I keep elsewhere so it will survive if my house burns down.

In other news, I'm really glad that my Ubuntu 18 install on the laptop failed, because Lubuntu 16 is so much faster on it than Ubuntu 16 was. I wish I'd put Lubuntu on the laptop in the first place.

And in yet more news, I toyed with the idea of buying a tablet today, now they're so cheap, but I didn't, because I've already got a desktop PC, a laptop and two modern mobile phones.

Actually I've already got 3 desktop PCs, I was forgetting. But the extra two are very old.

In the latest news of my ten year old Acer Aspire One netbook that keeps freezing, I've now updated the bios (for the firs time since I bought it ). If that doesn't sort it out, the only thing left that could be causing it is the graphics card.

I think that fixing that might involve soldering.

I have a soldering iron.

I don't have a clue how to use it.