First, I'd like to warn you that I'm not a very experienced Linux user. Please bear with me if my questions seem too silly.

I'm posting this here because I don't know whether this is a software or hardware issue. I'm using Red Hat 7.3 with KDE most of the time, and my machine seems to go crazy every few minutes, either locking up completely and forcing me to push the "reset" button or resetting on its own without any previous warning. The machine is very new - I started using if this Tuesday. It has a Athlon XP 1900+ processor on a Soyo Dragon Plus motherboard with 256MB of RAM. About the only major alteration I've made in the system was replacing Netscape 4.79 with the 7.0 version.

This may have something to do with me having to reset the motherboard's CMOS battery this morning. The first behaviour happened once before this, but seems to have gotten more frequent. The other one has begun today, and is also very frequent. All in all, one of them usually happens less than an hour after booting up the computer. Do you have any idea of what this could be?

My initial thought is that it's a hardware issue. Specifically, heat.

Did you build this box yourself?

You can check in /var/log/messages for some indication as to what happened.

j.