Today I began experiencing regular freezes on Xubuntu, within 5 minutes of booting up or so. No particular program seems to trigger the freeze, and I don't recall any modifications of my system recently before the problem began.
One strange thing I noticed was the output of "free -h". The swap line had all zeros under used, free, and share. I then went to Gparted and noticed a yellow warning sign for the swap partition (see photo 1). I clicked on the yellow warning sign and got more detail (see photo 2). I then used Gparted to reformat that partition. I used the format linux-swap. Then I tried free -h again but the swap line still had all zeros. Is there something else I needed to do in order for Xubuntu to recognize the swap partition? Could this swap partition even be related to the freezing problem?
I should also mention that the SysRq key does not seem to be working on my keyboard. Looking at other forum posts related to this problem led me to try alt+sysrq+f and alt+sysrq+reisub but nothing happens. Anorther thing I notice is that every time the system freezes the Caps lock light starts flashing!