f12 sometimes is slow to start

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 12:52:28 +0200,
  Natxo Asenjo <natxo.asenjo at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> There is one little problem. Every now and then when I boot the laptop
> it kind of 'freezes' and a few minutes later it works as it should
> without any other problems. I can change to a virtual terminal and
> login there, but if I try to login graphically it will take me like 2
> to 3 minutes to complete the process. I cannot see anything in the log
> files.

You might want to check you disk drives using smartctl (in the smartmontools
package). If you have some bad blocks, they could cause probelms.

On that time interval I would suspect either dns timeouts or lots of disk
activity as what you are waiting on.