Hey guys. Well I certainly do have a head scratcher on my hands here. My dad recently got a laptop from a friend (used to be his daughters) and I thought that rather than reformat it every 2 weeks, I would just stick on linux, set it up with what he wants and then with x11vnc and remote SSH for if he had issues. Bassically, the problem is that this laptop will not go longer than about 10 minutes before it freezes. The crashes are definately kernel level since all HDD activity and network I/O freezes. Theres no common thing happening when it crashes, hence why I think its a driver issue.

Initially I installed ubuntu and thought it might be a bad install, so i re-installed and the issue was still happening. Just out of interest, i booted into the liveCD and the issue STILL happened. So I tried installing with a different CD and same issue. So considering it might be something ubuntu specific, I have now installed OpenSUSE 11.1 and the issue still happens there.

My only suspicsion is that its somehow related to the wifi card, whether be driver or hardware related. The only thing that is always running when it crashes is firefox, although not nescessarily doing anything, but it is running. I just know its an athereos based card of some sort, being a sony vaio, its pretty obscure on actual hardware. Although its well out of warranty so i don't mind pulling out the wifi card to check it over in my own laptop if it comes to that.

Cheers, Adam

Hi there,

I think it very well could be the wireless card if it is PCMCIA, sometimes it causes hangs in laptops, so try removing it and see if it still crashes.

It would also be nice if you look through some of the system logs, found at /var/log/syslog and /var/log/messages and see if there is any error given at the time of the crash.

The card is internal although I do have a PCMCIA card to test it with.

If it is internal, then first look through the logs, you don't want to mess anything up inside the laptop.

Hi,
My laptop gets hot after a while and I hear the CPU fan run..Is your device overheating? Sometime the heatsink fins gets stopped up with dust..May need cleaning..
This is a longshot but certainly possible..
jolphil