This T61 is having similar issues under Winders - random freezes for many seconds at a time, with the HD light full on (but no changes in the Google Desktop HD access widget). I'm assuming it's the drive, too, though nothing systematic has shown up in chkdsk, Windows logs, etc. No viruses, no help in turning services off, etc. It's annoying.

It doesn't seem to have any problems with Ubuntu 10.04, so I think it's a problem with the Winders partition..

I got a 640GB Samsung to swap in, but haven't done the backup and cloning yet.

I'm glad yours turned out well - thanks for the linky. Fingers crossed here...

Cheers,
Scott.

IME, Winders gets slow and disk intensive when it hits the page/swap file when half the full (real + virtual) is in use, but this is different. IIRC, when it's paging/swapping on my other machines, the disk and memory meters still run fine, the clock updates, etc. (though sometimes jerkily). On the T61 when this happens, everything just hangs for several seconds (rather like malraux described).

It may be contributing though - I know the Winders partition doesn't have a lot (multi-GB) free space, and things are still fragmented even after several defragmentation passes.

Thanks.

Cheers,
Scott.