hi there. just installed lubuntu on an older labtop i recently recieved. problem is its constantly crashing especially when i load a browser, doesnt matter if its firefox or chromium. it locks up the laptop and hard reset is my only option. sometimes its frozen screen and sometimes its frozen and the whole screen is flashing. im completely new to linux and would like to learn, if anyone can tell me where to go from here would be great.

Welcome to LinuxQuestions

Please post the make and model of your laptop with its specifications if possible. Also what version of lubuntu are you running? Not enough RAM or bad RAM could be the problem. Have you looked at the log files (/var/log)?

hp g60 notebook with an amd turion x2 64 processor and nvidia graphics card. i have 2 gigs of ram. lubuntu 14.04.3. is my os. no logs yet, not sure how to even go about doing that

See the following for running a memory test.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MemoryTest

To view logs:
http://www.howtogeek.com/117878/how-...les-on-ubuntu/

ran memtest for an hour and it passed, 0 errors. im gonna run another memtest later tonight till morning. its been running fine today so far. any other ideas?

Flaky hard drive?

not sure, anyway to test. ive only had this notebook for like three day and its all been web surfing and youtube videos. my videos cant keep up the video always lags behind sound. laptop gets pretty dam hot, fan seems to be working tho

Possibly a video driver problem. Are you using the Nvidia driver or nouveau? If the former, you might try the latter; if the latter, try the former. I use currently use nouveau on my desktops (GeForce 9100 and 6100), but there have been times when the Nvidia driver worked whereas the nouveau driver would crash.

Hi...

Welcome to the forum

What is the brand and model (and model number) of the laptop?

The hard drive should be examined but the fact that it's getting so hot suggests a different, if not additional, cause. You first might want to disassemble the laptop and make sure there is no dust build up in the CPU (and/or possibly GPU) heatsink and make sure the fan is working correctly. You can find more information on this here.

As for the hard drive, you can install and run the tools mentioned here, or if you can give us the brand name and model of the hard drive, we might be able to guide you to one of the manufacturer's utilities. You can find that out using the "System Profiler and Benchmark" utility under "Start Button"-->"System Tools." Or you can use the utilities mentioned here.

If you don't feel comfortable performing these tasks, I would recommend that you take your computer to a reputable computer repair technician or shop and have them inspect it thoroughly and perform any tests.

Regards...