Old Inspiron 8100 pauses, unresponsive

[wittygirl]

I have an old Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop that is extremely slow. It will eventually load up Windows but then it becomes intermittently and periodically unresponsive. You can move the mouse around and it will do nothing (for say 30 seconds) until the hard drive light turns on and it moves for a second or so and then the whole system becomes unresponsive again. Repeats this cycle over and over again. Any idea what's wrong or if it's fixable? I'd like to either reformat it or install Linux on it if I can get it working.

Thanks!

Inspiron 8100
Mobile Pentium III - 1.20 GHz / 800 MHz
CPU Speed: 1.20 GHz
Level 2 Cache: 512 kB
System Memory: 256 MB
Video Controller: NVidia GeForce 2G0
Video Memory: 32 MB
Hard Drive: 30.0 GB

[ffarrell]

Pull one or both batteries, then reboot without them. That was my problem and it took me forever to figure it out.

[Prophilaxis]

Is this a recent post? The 8100 is a dinosaur. It's memory capacity is crippling at 512 MB. Basically, you need a new computer.