In Ubuntu 7.10 the boot hard disk is checked every 20 boots. I have to boot my laptop quite often, so about once a week booting takes more than 10 minutes. This clearly sucks. Fortunately, there is an easy way to fix this. With tune2fs it is possible to change the interval from mount-times to timed interval:
sudo tune2fs -c 0 -i 1m /dev/sda3
This disables maximum mount time for forced check, but instead uses timed check. Every month the harddisk is forced to get checked. I can live with that.