Random lockups

["Don Levey-7" <user=51@nabble.blu.org>]

 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 

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