On a whim I decided to install slack 10.1 on my desktop (it was time for a good system clean anyways) and keep having hard crashes. No ping responses, screen locks up and I'm unable to do anything but power off the machine. The first time this happened, I powered off the machine and when it was rebooting it got stuck while trying to start hotplug, again machine froze and completely unresponsive. I tried turning off hotplug and disabling it from startup on the next sucessful boot. Same thing keeps happening.

I've noticed that each time it freezes it has some kind of sound playing (video, mp3, etc etc), but its not right away (if at all) it might take a few min / hour before it will freeze. Thats my current line of thought as to the problem.

Randomly after a freeze also, my NIC won't work. I can't assign ip addresses and this appears in my log file.

May 9 03:15:04 beowulf logger: SIOCADDRT: Network is unreachable

If I try to assign an IP by hand I get this:

root@beowulf:~# ifconfig eth1 192.168.86.37 up
SIOCSIFADDR: No such device
eth1: unknown interface: No such device
eth1: unknown interface: No such device

Eventually it will work again after some black magic and LOTS of rebooting.

I'm stumped on this. The logs show nothing interesting. Anyone have any ideas?

Broken installation media? Broken hardware? Does other operation systems work well on the same laptop?

off topic.
heheh I love that ^ sig (-.-)

Yes, before I cleared out the OS it had fully working copies of Win2k and SuSE 9.1. This is my desktop, not laptop Laptop has a funtional slack10.1 install on it that I used the same CDs to install. So i'm pretty sure the CDs are fine.