Slackware 12.1: XOrg freezes after CPU upgrade

meikitsu · 11-03-2008, 09:26 AM

Hi there,

I seem to have worked myself into another mess. The other day, I upgraded my 2.4GHz Celeron CPU to a 2.6GHz Pentium 4 CPU. And now I see my KDE 3.5.9 desktop freeze semi-randomly.
I use almost everything the way it came on the Slack DVD, apart from the occasional app that does not seem to cause the problem, and as far as I know, the (old) Celeron 2.4GHz belongs to the same processor family as the Pentium 4.

I have tried to establish some sort of a pattern, but cannot find it: first time it was Firefox (3.0.3) when opening a rather flashy website, and with MPlayerplugin playing and KTorrent on; second time it was with OpenTTD playing and KTorrent on; third time it was on starting KTorrent - and fourth time it was just Firefox running. But what puzzles me the most, is that this problem did not exist on my previous CPU.

Any idea on what might cause this? Defective CPU, perhaps? Or should it cause the problems less randomly then?

CPU: now Pentium 4 2.6GHz
RAM: 1024MB
MB: Asus P4PE-X
Vid: ATI Radeon 9600

Thanks in advance!

keefaz · 11-03-2008, 10:05 AM

You can do a CPU/memory stress test with kernel compilation.
This way you can do the CPU test without X running (to discard video driver failure)
Download the kernel sources from http://www.kernel.org, then tar xvf it and cd into it, and run:

Code:

while true; do
  make mrproper
  make defconfig
  make
done

(ctrl-c to stop it)
Then see if it has problem, if all is good then I would suspect video driver problem

meikitsu · 11-03-2008, 12:06 PM

Running it at this very moment, without really knowing how long I should make it last

So far everything seems to run ok, so I'm afraid I'm still looking for an answer... Anyone?

keefaz · 11-03-2008, 12:27 PM

Re-install video drivers maybe ?
(a real CPU test would be run the above test for 30 minuts at a minimum)

meikitsu · 11-03-2008, 01:01 PM

Tried that, downloaded ATI's drivers, can't even start x now. Certainly solves the problem of it freezing

Continuing my search... (although it might be easier to just revert to the old CPU as the difference between the two is far from enormous)

H_TeXMeX_H · 11-03-2008, 01:03 PM

Did you install the CPU yourself ? If so did you apply new thermal paste after scraping off the old one ? Does the CPU temperature look ok ?

Does X just crash or does the whole computer ?