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I converted a friend into trying linux out. We tried to install Ubuntu 8.10 on his HP laptop. It has a AMD sempron 3800+ processor and 3Gb of RAM. The install was painfully slow and after a reboot, we got the following error on startup Bug: 8254 timer not connected to IO-APIC The machine did boot up and was incredibly slow. We tried to get the latest updates and drivers, but after a few hours the downloads hadnt finished. We tried the noapic addition to the boot, no difference. Looking at the bug on the net, we see it shows up around 2005, the laptop is from 2005. There is no option in the bios to do with apic (there was a solution involving this). Any solution is very welcome.