I'm a bit annoyed.

As a newbie I expected that there would be difficulties getting hardware to work and also in understanding the ins and outs of a linux system. However I did not expect to have to deal with the operating system actually crashing.

I have a Sony Vaio PCG-F808K which has an HSF Modem. These modems require the installation a Linuxant driver which costs about $14. It took me ages to get the modem working.

Now it dials up fine, however after a couple of minutes online the whole system stalls. No response from anything. I've left it for a couple of hours, but eventually I have to bite the bullet and pull the power supply and battery out.

In contrast, even though I've tried my best, I've NEVER been able to get WinXP to crash. I thought one of the great benifits of linux was its stability, would somebody please explain what I am doing wrong?

on some systems you may need to turn suspend off in your bios.
APM, either that or you dont have APM compiled in your kernel adn or APMD running.

try turning that off in your bios completely.

if it still stalls its a IRQ hardware setting problem or driver problem.

Ive never crashed my system, not even application/software crashing.

Thanks, how do I do this please?

try to pass the apm=off option to your kernel. depending on wether you have grub or lilo installed, add this to the kernel description line in /etc/lilo.conf (and run lilo) or /boot/grub/grub.conf.