What could be causing this behaviour?

M$ISBS · 03-18-2006, 11:12 PM

I have had several crashes in the last few days. Crashes to KDM and rebooting with no icons and having to reboot several times.
The most frustrating is when I am online and all of a sudden Linux freezes and nothing works, ctrl-alt-backspace or any keyboard combos work, I end up having to hit the reset button.

I have:
Slack 10.2
KDE 3.4.3
Opera 8.51

bluelightning · 03-18-2006, 11:27 PM

Maybe your CPU is overheating. Try running cpuburn.

I saw a computer that would freeze after about 20min of compiling or other hard work. Under a light load it would run for hours. Cpuburn would freeze it in 3 seconds. Turns out the heat sink compound on the CPU had an air bubble. After reapplying it, cpuburn ran without problems.

Randux · 03-18-2006, 11:30 PM

Also maybe it's time for a fsck for whatever filesystem(s) you are using.

shepper · 03-18-2006, 11:52 PM

On my test box (Tiger Direct $29 Special) with an onboard trident video chip it would freeze until I decreased my default color depth from 24 to 16. It would only freeze when rapidly scrolling (scroll bar or mouse wheel) vertically in Mozilla or Firefox.

onebuck · 03-19-2006, 10:32 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by M$ISBS

I have had several crashes in the last few days. Crashes to KDM and rebooting with no icons and having to reboot several times.
The most frustrating is when I am online and all of a sudden Linux freezes and nothing works, ctrl-alt-backspace or any keyboard combos work, I end up having to hit the reset button.

I have:
Slack 10.2
KDE 3.4.3
Opera 8.51

Hi,

I agree with some other posters' about over heating as a possibility. But I would include a memtest to be run using memtest86. You can use a live cd like systemrecuescd or a bootable memtest86 floppy/cd.

Let it run for awhile. The test are thorough and beat the memory hard.

By chance have you cleaned the box out lately? Those dust bunnies wreak havoc on a system. Heat exchange will not be at the peak with dust on the heatsinks let alone chips.

HTH!

M$ISBS · 03-19-2006, 10:34 AM

There may be 2 problems, the freezing and KDE not starting. Just last night I rebooted and KDE will not start up no matter what, so I am using window maker, its really confusing but I guess I will learn.