I believe I have left the swamp....
About a week ago my Precise installation seemed to be coming apart at the seams.
First, there were niggly little problems here and there, but no patterns and nothing reproducible. Then the -19 kernel upgraded to -20. That's when things went to pot, so to speak, and my DE was behaving like Win95 and on its way to WinME.
The rtl8188ce wireless chip, driven by the rtl8192ce driver, was slow and often went dormant and unresponsive, and even though KNetwork manager never indicated a broken connection, and the bandwidth was flat lined at 0 KiB/s. To get it active again I often disconnected and reconnected my wifi manually. And, during a video, or just when you clicked a link, Chromium would appear to freeze for up to a minute or so before it would resume sending packets back and forth. Sometimes "Snap!" would appear with no indication and several reloads would be necessary to see content.
Flashplayer would crash a lot, something it never did on me before. I had little hope of seeing a video to its conclusion without seeing "Snap!".
Minecraft was fast when started up but slowed down and eventually crashed. A BSOD appeared once when the temp hit 140F.
Chromium stopped loading reliably when the quick launcher icon was used.
KMail would frequently crash on its own during loading, and often when I deleted a msg.
I got an error msg from the HD ... bad sectors.
Apport crashed reporting crashes, and both Muon and apt-get had failures.
And when just about anything was run this laptop temp rose to 140F.
On 3/11/12 I purchased a 4GB stick to top out my memory at 8GB. It passed the memory test twice, so I never suspected it. Around noon I ran the memory test again and the stick of RAM I had added had failed! I pulled it out and suddenly everything but the wifi returned to rock solid normal. The temp idles at around 100F. Minecraft is fast and solid. KMail is good.
But, Chromium was still lagging, stalling and throwing Snaps even though KNM didn't indicate any problems. I set swec=1 but that didn't help. I ran lshw and noticed that it reported my chip as an rtl8188ce, not an rtl8192ce. Thinking it would make a difference if I ran the "right" driver I went to the Realteck website looking for it. On the web site it was labeled as rtl8188ce for linux and kernels upto 3.2.x, but when I untarred it I found it was the latest rtl8192ce driver. But, I cd'd into its directory and ran "make install" as root. It compiled and installed the rtl8192ce driver. I rebooted.
That was 3 1/2 hours ago. I have not had a single hang with Chromium, nor has it lagged.
All is well in the garden now. :cool:
First, there were niggly little problems here and there, but no patterns and nothing reproducible. Then the -19 kernel upgraded to -20. That's when things went to pot, so to speak, and my DE was behaving like Win95 and on its way to WinME.
The rtl8188ce wireless chip, driven by the rtl8192ce driver, was slow and often went dormant and unresponsive, and even though KNetwork manager never indicated a broken connection, and the bandwidth was flat lined at 0 KiB/s. To get it active again I often disconnected and reconnected my wifi manually. And, during a video, or just when you clicked a link, Chromium would appear to freeze for up to a minute or so before it would resume sending packets back and forth. Sometimes "Snap!" would appear with no indication and several reloads would be necessary to see content.
Flashplayer would crash a lot, something it never did on me before. I had little hope of seeing a video to its conclusion without seeing "Snap!".
Minecraft was fast when started up but slowed down and eventually crashed. A BSOD appeared once when the temp hit 140F.
Chromium stopped loading reliably when the quick launcher icon was used.
KMail would frequently crash on its own during loading, and often when I deleted a msg.
I got an error msg from the HD ... bad sectors.
Apport crashed reporting crashes, and both Muon and apt-get had failures.
And when just about anything was run this laptop temp rose to 140F.
On 3/11/12 I purchased a 4GB stick to top out my memory at 8GB. It passed the memory test twice, so I never suspected it. Around noon I ran the memory test again and the stick of RAM I had added had failed! I pulled it out and suddenly everything but the wifi returned to rock solid normal. The temp idles at around 100F. Minecraft is fast and solid. KMail is good.
But, Chromium was still lagging, stalling and throwing Snaps even though KNM didn't indicate any problems. I set swec=1 but that didn't help. I ran lshw and noticed that it reported my chip as an rtl8188ce, not an rtl8192ce. Thinking it would make a difference if I ran the "right" driver I went to the Realteck website looking for it. On the web site it was labeled as rtl8188ce for linux and kernels upto 3.2.x, but when I untarred it I found it was the latest rtl8192ce driver. But, I cd'd into its directory and ran "make install" as root. It compiled and installed the rtl8192ce driver. I rebooted.
That was 3 1/2 hours ago. I have not had a single hang with Chromium, nor has it lagged.
All is well in the garden now. :cool:
)
Comment