Was given a laptop that the customer didnt want to invest any time or money into fixing it. All he wanted from it was his hard drive which i removed and gave to him into an external enclosure so that he had his data. The laptop wouldnt turn on and no LEDs would light when plugged into the wall. I looked and saw that the cord was ragged in one spot and a meter showed that there was no 19VDC output. The break in the wire was too close to the power supply to fix it, but I had a 19VDC HP power supply from another laptop that was given to me in which I saved the good power supply and so amperage was about the same and so I cut the healthy section of cord with the Gateway computer plug, cut off the HP plug end, and wired it up with correct plug end and polarity and shrink tubed the connections to insulate it and then the Gateway Laptop worked with a healthy 19VDC power supply.
I didnt have a hard drive for it and dont have a copy of Vista to use the key affixed to the laptop so I decided to put Linux Mint 17.3 32-bit Cinnamon onto a bootable USB stick. No problems in making the bootable stick. Laptop booted right at the get go off of the USB port and Linux Mint 17.3 was running off of the USB stick with no problems, however the more the laptop runs the more laggy Linux mint 17.3 gets. As well as when going to shut down or reboot the laptop the shutdown icon is sometimes missing when its glitched yet you can click where the icon would be in the menu and it will start the shutdown process.
On reboot its healthy again for a while and after about an hour of use it starts to get laggy and glitchy, the corruption/problem builds. On reboot none of the corruption writes to the USB stick so it starts up healthy after a reboot until its running and the problem starts to build onto itself again with more use.
Ran Memtest86 off of a Disc in the DVD Drive and it passed the memory test after 5 passes with no problems, so pretty sure the system RAM is healthy.
Thinking that maybe there is some sort of memory leak or issue with this running as a Live OS. I also have the Live OS on the stick set up with the remainder of the 8GB which is about 3.9GB to be free for installing programs and personal data to the thumb drive. Programs install with no problems.
Tried using a different USB stick thinking maybe there was a corruption going on with read/write to the usb stick, but a different 4GB USB stick started to glitch out after about the same amount of time.
I also as a troubleshooting method ran Knoppix 7.4.2 off of DVD ROM and it runs without glitches for hours. So I know that the laptop itself its hardware is healthy based on that fact that Knoppix has no issues. I prefer not to use Knoppix only because its strictly read only off of a DVD-R and I like the USB flash drive method because you can install programs and save personal data as you use it vs the Knoppix etch-a-sketch type of Live Read-Only Distro.
So I have come down to the fact that its a issue with this laptop and Linux Mint 17.3 32-bit Cinnamon but unsure of the direct cause.... USB Driver, Memory Leak, other Instability Issue?
Figured I'd check here to see if anyone has any ideas on how to troubleshoot this issue further...
Gateway MT6821 - Core 2 Duo 1.6Ghz Dual core - 2GB RAM
http://www.cnet.com/products/gateway-mt6821-core-2-duo-1-6ghz-2gb-ram-160gb-hdd-vista-home-premium/specs/
