While I have my desktop machine up and running, I’ve been wanting to use the laptop a bit more for my workflow. There’s just one little thing that was bothering me: occasional complete system hesitation. The whole machine would just completely stop. No mouse movements, no keyboard response, nothing– for about ten seconds, then it’d suddenly come back to life and all the backed up input would just be there.

I’ve been suspecting it was the hard drive. I mean, it’s a 2.5" laptop mechanical drive dating to 2011– it certainly wasn’t expected to last this long in general. I swapped in an extra SSD I can’t use in my main machine (for incredibly annoying reasons) and reinstalled Linux. The reinstall wasn’t strictly necessary, but it’s nice to get a clean install and see about doing a better job of customizing it from the very start this time.

That takes a bit of time, though. I’ve got it about 3/4 of where I want it to be after about five hours, so I can’t really complain. Since I’m not using an encrypted volume this time (those really do not get along with SSDs) I can do a proper disk image backup as well.

It isn’t showing any of the hesitation it did before, so it probably was the drive. I’ll know for sure in the next day or two.

— Firehawke