I have to say I am kind of worried right now, up till several days ago my computer was working great and it has started behaving in a very unstable manor, it crashed 4 times earlier, I was in the middle of doing stuff and it just rebooted itself, and earlier when I was just using amarok the whole machione froze and I had to reboot, this behaviour seems very like one time I had a virus when I was running windows XP, is it possible that I now have a linux virus?? I know these are meant to be rare but they do exist dont they? Also I have heard about rootkits too, do I have one of them? Arent they like trojans?

Can anyone please help? I am very worried about this and dont know what to do, on windows I would be running adaware and all that stuff but linux has nothing that I can run to check for intrsuion problems!!!
Do I just wipe my harddrive?

forgot to mention this earlier - it seems when my system crashes the clock in kde changes to a different time, this is very odd....isnt it??

I would start by looking through your Log files to see if you can spot what caused the crash.. more likely you have a piece of hardware that is failing.

You think that is more likely the problem? To be honest I am not sure exactly how to read log files and know what they mean.

Just running clamav there and it has picked up a virus - worm.startion.kg but from searches i have done this seems to be a windows virus that has come in through an email in thunderbird, could this cause a problem?

Random reboots are usually hardware related. The primary suspect is a failing power supply. The secondary suspect is something overheating. Check to make sure your CPUs heat sink fan is operating and that things are not filled up with dust. Check the other fans as well. Overheating or failing memory modules can also give you this symptom.

Ok, I checked the fans for dust and for heat and everything seems ok there, I also did a memtest only a week or so ago I was worried about something else at that point, any other thoughts?

Hi, I had the same problem, and after quite a while of struggling, I found that the fan on my graphic card had stopped working (melted; yes, a fan melts :-)). Another problem was that the fans started turning at half their speed, and the computer did nothing (no beep, no display); that was a dead power supply. So if I were you, I'd thoroughly check ALL the hardware. Also check there isn't any connection problem anywhere (e.g. loose cables).

Good luck

Thank you for help, is there any software that can be used to check how well hardware is working? I know nothing about hardware problems and how to sort them out, how do I know if a piece of hardware is faulty, my box is full of stuff, if it is one piece of hardware how do i know which it is that causes the problems?

Nope. No software. It just takes experience and intuition, you will gain some determining this problem.

If you -really- wish to be sure it's not a virus, why not run a livecd for a day or two or (gasp) reinstall Windows on a particular partition?

If it still fails, definitely hardware.

I work for a datacenter and deal with problems like this once a week or more, and usually its the RAM. If yours checks out OK, I'd just swap components until it comes down to your motherboard. Since you don't have much experience with hardware, it's unlikely you have parts lying all around to swap, but hopefully you'll be able to sort it out.

Also, check out /var/log/messages and /var/log/dmesg when anything funny starts happening, sometimes the kernel picks up oddities and reports about them. (Sometimes during memory, ALL the time when it's the filesystem) The kernel has very nice error trapping.

Take care,
Jon