Puppy sometimes takes forever to save

[fresnofred]

I am using precise puppy on an 8 gb usb drive with lots of save space left.
It usually performs well but sometimes has these 2 issues:
1) Autosave will come on and stay on forever.
2) Sometimes when i shut down, it will "save session" and when I come back 45 mins later it still has not shut down.
Just annoyances but does anyone have any ideas on this?

[Flash]

My first guess is that the USB flash memory is intermittently losing contact with the port. If you have another flash memory that is big enough, try cloning your Precise install to it and see if it does the same thing.

[bigpup]

Try plugging into a different USB port.

Does the speed of the drive match the speed of the port?

Turning off auto save could possibly help.

Has Windows done anything on this USB drive?

What is the specs of this computer?
Make and model?

What version of Puppy?

Running from a USB flash drive. Puppy is designed to limit the writes to the drive, so when it does write to the save, there is usually a lot of stuff needing to be written.

[Moat]

I've had this happen a time or three on the same make/model USB sticks (cheapo, low-end PNY's), and more-or-less narrowed it down to the sticks' ability to take writes partially "failing". Afterwards, deleting the Puppy install and using them as a typical storage device, the writes to the drives remained painfully slow. Even after re-formatting to various other file systems (NTFS, FAT, EXT4, etc...) and using on both Windows and Linux computers.

Flash's idea of cloning the Pup install to a known good drive may be a worthwhile check for that sort of issue, IOW.

Bob