Thought it might be a startup daemon, so cancelled some of those but alas no use. Computer is now completely useless as it's got worse on successive updates.
Mouse staggers, hard drive light permanently on. Ver 20.04.02
Using phone to access this forum so SLOW and tedious process
Any help on would be appreciated. Var logs?
Hi 
If you are you able to get to text mode tty (Ctrl + Alt + F1 on login screen) you can try creating one new user and check if this is not related to your user profile.
You can do it this way :
sudo adduser testuser and fallow the steps.
usermod -aG sudo testuser to add this user to sudo group
Next switch back to graphical user interface (Ctrl + Alt + F7) and try to connect with the new created user.
Good luck
Thank you Olek. So I Ctrl + Alt +1 then after 10 minutes got thrown out of desjtop with this -->
So I tried Ctrl + Alt + F7, got back in and can atm use my PC
Any ideas?
Hi
Try to run top or htop command when you are in the text mode terminal. There is something that makes your machine run out of memory, or your machine have poor memory configuration. Let's try to figure out what it is
I prefer htop for that - more graphical - easy to understand the data :
Thank you so much Olek. Will try it out
Currently running htop but okay atm, so next time it locks up/freezes will give it a go.
Thanks 
He's already got the answer, I think: indicator-dat[e-time] is hemorrhaging memory like crazy, burning all the RAM he has and causing swap thrash. Hence the constant disk access, and the desktop failing to respond to mouse movement properly, because Linux's swap handling is TERRIBLE.
@linuxian Try removing the clock from your toolbars, and see what happens next time you reboot.
The only concern is that if you upgraded from ?18? to ?20? when the default clock applet was changed, you might have a zombie one still "on" the bar that you can't see to remove, but hopefully not.
Hi @arQon, thanks for the response. Can't seen the clock which was one of my issues lol.
What I currently do is boot up, work for 2 minutes, crash for 15 minutes and then carry on as normal. So now since the last crash I haven't crashed again but will do once I log out for the day switch off, and turn on and log in again tomorrow. Rinse and repeat
If you haven't modified the panels much, it would probably be worth resetting them and then removing the clock applet.
Ideally, what you want to do is figure out WHY the applet is rampaging out of control like that, but that's not really a user-solvable problem.
I will say that I don't HAVE an "indicator-dat[e-time]" running on this machine, despite having a clock in the panel. So you must be running the "improved" version from a newer version of MATE, which obviously still has some rather major issues.
Since the old version is still there, you should be able to solve your problem by removing that new one and using the old one instead.
Thanks all, this is a really friendly site 
. Appreciated.
@olek - managed to install htop then booted up the next day, used my two minutes pre-freezing to invoke and let it run. It clearly confirmed the clock issue was as @arQon suggested (as well as being confirmed by the text of my previous error code in a previous post). Just before it locked up had indicator-datetime-service at 100% CPU and memory at 87.8% and 2Gb swap at...er...2Gb lol
@arQon - yes I did a "....remove/purge indicator-datetime". Then I did a panel reset because I lost my settings/logout icon having messed around trying to get rid of clocks that weren't there anyway lol
It's been a couple of days since I followed advice and so far so good. No freezing
So it's obviously not an ideal situation to have to remove standard packages as a workaround but at least I'm operational again without having to wait for an internal kill process every day.
Brilliant support.
Thank you
The last piece would be to file a bug on launchpad. I avoided the "new and improved" clock simply because I don't like it, but given that it's obviously got catastrophic (but apparently rare) bug it would be good to have that recorded.
Mate is a volunteer project, but hopefully whoever added the new one is still around and will look into it as time permits.
