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I often hit the caps lock key (once) to see if the indicator light comes on to tell if the whole computer is dead.

This was my favorite test as well, back in the day.

Why back in the day? It should still work just as effectively.

Sure does. Did you know that you can still entirely lock up windows simply by having a bunch of programs access the hard drive too much at once?

(And last time I made linux thrash it wasn't any better. Why is it so easy to keep the system responsive when a program or two hogs the CPU, but so hard when they hog disk I/O.)

I haven't actually looked into this question, but I suspect the problem isn't so much that the system isn't responsive when I/O is hogged, but rather that individual programs are not responsive. On my computer, I occasionally get into a congested hard drive issue, and almost all programs I am running are incredibly non-responsive. However, my window manager (awesome), and virtual terminals stay snappy during this period. This is in contrast to when my CPU starts getting thrashed, when even those begin to get unusable.

In my experience the core UI systems usually lock up. I can't use even the simplest already-active non-memory-allocating programs. And can you explain caps lock not responding for 8 seconds without 'total system lockup'?

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