System almost freezes, immediately after fresh install

[EricE]

Hi there, I'm a newbie here AND a Linux nitwit, but I'm still gonna try to post a question here. Hope anybody can help me....

Some months ago I installed Kubuntu 12.04 LTS on my desktop PC of about 8 years old and was absolutely thrilled by the great result. It was like a second youth for it, faster then ever before on XP!! So far, so good.

BUT..... having this great experience, I wanted to put Kubuntu (meanwhile 12.04.1) on my old Vista laptop of about 5 years old as well. Burned a new ISO-CD and went to work. I complety reformated the laptop (using the guided [top] option) to fit the new Kubuntu onto it
Now, the problem is that, immediately after installation upon first startup, Kubuntu is almost non-responsive. The system boots to the desktop and mouse cursor moves over the screen, but the only buttons that respond are the "new activity" buttons in the top and bottom right corner. The rest just doesn't respond to any mouse clicks whatsover.....

See screenshot for my partitioning (made using the "try" option of Kubuntu, which seems to work perfect.)

Can anybody pleeaaase help me. It would be a big shame if this turned out to be a "bricked" laptop...
Many thanks for any helpfull responses!

[Snowhog]

Welcome to KFN.

Your screenshot isn't visable -- broken image link.

We need to know the specs of your laptop, specifically, what video card/graphics chip is has.

[GreyGeek]

Interesting.

A friend of mine, (thought he was in his mid to late 50s but he told me saturday while we were shopping for a new laptop for him that he is 68. Attribs it to the Chuck Norris machine!), bought a new Acer 7250-3821 and I took it home to install Kubuntu for him. His old machine, a desktop, had an HD that was in its death spasms.

I burned a 12.04.1 Kubuntu disk from a checked ISO and the CD checked out as well. I installed it and then went through my customary app installations and configurations. It The configuration pgm began running slower and slower. Then, it began freezing after the login screen, while the desktop was being generated. Going through the recovery option wasn't working, so I decided to reinstall from the original 12.04 CD that I used to install Kubuntu 12.04 on this Acer V3-771G.

I've got it up and running and configured the way it was when the 12.04.1 started freezing, and it is running perfectly, with full updates.

Oddly, on the Acer 7250, Pulseaudio sees TWO sound cards: "Built-in Audio Digital Stereo (HDMI)" and "Built-in Audio Analog Stereo". Things work OK, so far.

[EricE]

Hi, thanks for your quick response!

Video is Nvidia G72M [Quadro NVS 110M/GeForce Go 7300] 128MB. Processor is Intel Centrino Duo T5500 @1.66Ghz, 2 GiB RAM.

BTW, below is the screen shot, now working. Basically, these partions are not what I really wanted, but I got a little confused what to do during set-up.
I would just like to have one partition with Kubuntu on it (heard that should be around 10-15 GB) and another partition with all my docs and stuff on it.
Would be great if you could give me some advice on this as well.

Best regards and many many thanks in advance!
Eric

PS: In Holland itś now almost 1 am, so my wife is getting a little impatient but Iĺl be waiting your answer in the moring! Thanks again.

[GreyGeek]

P.S. --
I was so stunned about the age of my friend I forgot to mention why I posted on this thread...

His 6 year old desktop has VISTA installed and it was crashing all the time. My assumption was that it was loaded with viri, but I wasn't going to pick up supporting a Windows box, especially VISTA. I booted the 12.04.1 CD and gave the LiveCD a try. It was slow, but everything worked fine. I started the install. The install was slow. I knew something was wrong when it was 21% done after an hour. I killed the process and took the machine home. Here, I booted the Gmagic 6.1 LiveCD and ran the HD diagnostics app it has. The six minute test passed fine. The one hour test died twice, in the same place, at 40% complete. It's logs gave the position in the HD were the error was. The kernel logs showed repeated failures to write to the HD. A message about failed reads/writes message being repeated 15 times (each time involved a 2 minute period), kept repeating periodically in the logs.

The mouse would move, desktop icons would highlight, but that was about all. Click on a Konsole and 10 or 15 minutes later it would appear, but when typing in it characters wouldn't appear.

Ten Hail Stallman's had no effect, so I pronounced it dead.