Hi everyone, i am new to Linux after i became fed up with Windows 10 but am having problems getting a distro to work on my laptop, it's a HP Pavillion 15 with a AMD A4 5000 quad core cpu, not great but it should at least work and 8gb ram, i have tried Ubuntu 16.04, Mint 18 and MX Linux 17.1 all 64 bit, and i have the same problem with all of them, that is they keep crashing especially when i browse the web, has anyone else had this problem, i am begining to think it is not the distro as they all have the same problem but is a hardware issue with my laptop which while a bit slow with windows 10 ran windows 8 perfectly, any help will be well recieved, thanks, Reesy.

HP Pavilion 15" / AMD A4 5000 Quad core CPU, 8GM Ram
Is that in the DV-7 Entertainment notebook series?

I assume it has a hard drive. Can you provide detail about storage?

Have you run the hardware diagnostics?

yep, I'd start looking at hardware, maybe unset and reset RAM and HDD.

Defiantly use a live USB Stick and run Linux off that and see if you can replicate the cause of the crashing of your web browser?

as this needs to be defined more

"that is they keep crashing especially when i browse the web,"

in crashing meaning what exactly? freezing up or system shutting down, seg faults whenever you "browse the web", what web browser are you using, or by whatever mean you use to browse the web, etc..

My dad's HP laptop became very sluggish with all new snazzy Win10 feature updates. I guess this is the natural death for all low/mid budget laptops running M$, unless you change the OS.

The laptop has been revived and it now runs CentOS without any problem, so please give the centos live iso a try. Note that it's not the snazziest and greatest distro especially for home use, so if you choose to stay with it, research a little beforehand. Here's the link to centos mirrors.

Could you also run programs (from your existing , installed OS) from CLI (like $firefox) and when it crashes, the CLI should show the related errors. Post the errors here within CODE tags.

Bad RAM?

Thermal issue?

Battery issue?

Lots of reasons for an OLD laptop to give up the ghost. Odd that a laptop with 8GB ram would be problematic though. Perhaps some lm_sensor type things to monitor thermals to see if it's related to the crashing. Or one of those fanned laptop stand things and see if the issue goes away or improves. I've had similar issues right before a USB stick I was using suddenly stopped functioning. Although while using a browser seems more like a RAM or Thermal issue. Probably not RAM with 8GB though. Unless you're one of those that open more than a half dozen tabs.

Thanks to everyone who gave advise, it's much appreciated, the spec of my laptop is AMD A4 5000 processor with radion hd graphics,
ram is 800mhz DDR3-1600 BCLK 100 in 2 slots each containing 4096mb of samsung M471B517BHO YKO, the cpu temperature is 54 degrees C, it has a 160gb HDD, it had a 1TB HDD but i took it out to put in a caddy when the laptop became to slow with win 10 and put this one in just to try a Linux distro but i would have thought it would still be ok. it does seem to jump up the cpu usage to quite high before it crashes, by crashing i mean it just freezes, occasionally i can recover it by closing down whatever i'm using but far more often i have to switch it off with the on/off button and re start it, i have used firefox, google and palemoon browsers with no notable difference between them and whilst i do open more than one page sometimes it's never more than two and it seems to make no difference to it freezing,
i will try running it from a usb stick and see if that makes a difference to it, as fur unsetting and resetting the ram and hdd i would not know where to begin to do that unless you mean just unplug them and plug them back in which is simple enough, and also i'm afraid i do not know how to run the hardware diagnostics, thanks again for all your help it is great to know help is available and i really appreciate it. if all else fails i will give the centOS a go,.

A laptop can be difficult and risky to clean, but I might try a good cleaning and re-seat all connections and cables. You could have an airflow issue resulting in isolated overheating.

Hi everyone and thanks again for all your help, it's sorted now and running as smooth as silk, i was a bad stick of RAM and i just took it out without replacing it, it's still got 4GB so prob enough for what i want but i may replace it at some time as it's not expensive.

Great to hear, Reesy.

If you want, you can mark this thread as "Solved" (see "Thread Tools" at the top of this thread).

Try swapping slots with the two sticks. It could be the motherboard / slot, not the stick. If so, then replacing it would be a waste of money and effort.

careful, sometimes they have to be in fitting pairs, or they won't work together.
i once found out the hard way.