# My Apologies to FreeBSD OS



## jardows (Aug 24, 2021)

I have used exclusively FreeBSD on my laptop (a Dell Latitude E5570) since I purchased it used early last year.  I don't use this computer very often, preferring my desktop computer and only using the laptop whenever absolutely necessary.  Shortly after upgrading to 13.0-RELEASE, I started to notice some performance issues.  Chronologically, I think I first noticed issues with XFCE, so I installed MATE for my desktop environment.  I also started noticing some significant and constant lag in the UI after much use, especially noticeable when scrolling up and down in documents or web pages.  I thought this might be related to some of the quirks of 13, possibly relating to the video driver.  It got frustrating, and I even considered switching back to Windows so the computer would be more usable.

It has been a bit slow in the office at work, so today I brought the laptop in to test out some Wi-Fi connection issues and maybe track down the performance issues.  After making a few changes that should not have made any difference, the system started lagging badly, basically having freezes between any action.  Another restart to clear this up, and the computer's BIOS gave me a message that it could not find a bootable device.  I rebooted into the BIOS setup, and it was not detecting the drive at all!  Power down and restart, it comes up good, but then freezes during the OS load process.  With the previous error about not finding any boot device, I ran the internal Dell diagnostics, and the SSD failed the long DST test!  It would seem that the source of my problem has been a failing drive.

The moreal of the story here is to go ahead and run a relatively quick hardware diagnosis before spending days or weeks to investigate potential software issues!  Thankfully, I don't store much on this computer and was able to copy what I did have over to a USB flash drive.  Best Buy had my favorite NVME drive in stock, and on sale, so I picked one up on my lunch break, and hopefully will get to install it later this afternoon.


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## drhowarddrfine (Aug 25, 2021)

Say three "Hail McKusicks" and one "Bill Joy" and all will be forgiven.


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## eternal_noob (Aug 25, 2021)

The thread to worship FreeBSD is here








						BeaSDie's Mantra of the Week
					

[Click here to go to this week's BMW]  "Blessed are the disciples of the yea free BeaSD, for they have zfs on root, native dataset encryption, and a parallelized rc.d-init system written in POSIX shell."  Let's praise the yea free BeaSD & them contributors, commiters, ports maintainers and...




					forums.freebsd.org


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## mark_j (Aug 25, 2021)

The temerity to even think FreeBSD was at fault. 

Do it again and your punishment will be self flagellation. 

Seriously, I'm joking. (I love that tautology).


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## grahamperrin@ (Aug 25, 2021)

jardows said:


> SSD failed the long DST test!



It's also possible for an SSD to pass the test but fail horribly during normal use.


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## jardows (Aug 25, 2021)

grahamperrin said:


> It's also possible for an SSD to pass the test but fail horribly during normal use.


I've seen that plenty of times.  At least when I've had to process warranty claims, Dell usually accepts "replaced with known good part and problem went away" in lieu of diagnostics error codes.


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