A friend was complaining that her 3 year old Windows Vista install was taking "up to an hour" to become usable after booting, so I offered to take a look at it. There was a whole mess of stuff starting up on boot, but I broke the Windows habit before Vista was invented so don't know what's essential and what isn't. I ended up installing Ubuntu 11.10 on her empty D: drive and leaving her with a dual boot.

I installed the "xfce4" package because it was defaulting to a weird looking desktop with square icons down the left hand edge. Now it looks more like the Windows interface she's used to.

All seemed well until the next day when I received this from her:

Hi, Chris!  Everything is really working well so far, thank you so much again!!!!



The only thing that is happening today is that the laptop is randomly shutting itself

off while I'm typing.  I haven't hit the button, the battery is fully charged, etc.

I'm just going along, typing away, and all of a sudden it turns itself off.  Any

ideas why that would be happening?



Other than that, I'm really happy with the changes.  :-D

Any idea what the problem might be? Windows on the same computer never just powers off. It's a 2 GHz Celeron machine from 2008 or so, and she's doing nothing very intensive on it. Email in Google Chrome and documents in Libre Office is the extent of it.

I set up a 3GB swap partition, so I doubt it's running out of swap, and am stuck for ideas. It's an Acer Aspire 5315 ICL50.