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The recent thread on seemingly-random crashes by Jim KR got me thinking; events of the past 24 hours or so got me typing. My desktop machine at home was having lockup problems. Not that the machine would self-cycle or reboot; it would freeze. The screen would still display, the power was still on, but it would be completely unresponsive to any input. I would need to forcibly restart the machine itself. There were no errors, nothing written to the log files, no clue that I could pursue. More often than not it would happen when I wasn't even sitting at the machine. For quite a while I thought it was the graphics system. I was using an ATI Rage Pro 9600 card, and it *seemed* that it was when I was using the card-specific drivers (supplied by ATI or installed via Livna) that the freezes would happen. This conclusion may have been aided by circumstance; running graphics-heavy applications seemed to increase the frequency that this would happen. Still, at most it was happening every few weeks or so. Sometimes it would go for many weeks without an incident. Eventually, I thought to upgrade the video card, and got an nVidia 7600. When I took out the old card, I found that the installed fan was almost seized. "Aha!" said I - this must be a heat issue. I cleaned out quite a bit of dust from the case, made sure airflow was better, and made more of a point of monitoring the temperature. I had two more freezes, both when the room got VERY hot this summer, and it seemed the conclusion was correct. I took additional airflow steps to keep things cool. And yet in the 12-hour period between 7pm last night and 7am this morning, I experienced 4 more freezes. The machine was cool. It gets air. Memtest86 says my memory is fine. But I'm back to the graphics conclusion. I've been editing photos using gimp. Two of the freezes were when trying to select/move files in Thunar file manager. Those two actions precipitating a failure, and four failures in 12 hours, seem too much of a coincidence. Clearly I'm tickling something, but I have no idea what. Short of ripping the thing apart and replacing each part individually (way too expensive for me right about now) does anyone have any suggestions? Thanks, -Don -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [hidden email] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
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