At 10:35 13/11/2006, you wrote:
It is so random. Last night Firefox just vanished while running. I started it from command line and then it did not crash at all. I opened my gallery website which contains a lot of thumbnails (just to increase memory usage of firefox) and it handled it well. No crash. There was one kernel panic on friday evening (my wife used the reset button to reboot) so I don't know what the error message was. Could hard disk be a problem? As I am writing this mail, I have started a SMART self test (long) on the hda. Regards Vijay
If it's any use to anybody, mine running FC5 kept hanging and crashing all last week, getting progressively worse and worse. Tried running memtest overnight on Thursday. Friday morning there were no errors on the screen but the system had hung again.
Friday afternoon after work I unplugged everything, removed the covers and took it out into the back garden. None too gently blasted the crap out of it with the air compressor and blow gun. Best to hold the fan blades still whilst doing this I think otherwise they spin up to fantastic speeds in the high velocity air blast from the compressor.
There didn't appear to be very much dust inside it compared to some I've seen but afterwards the processor heat sink looked just about as clean as new again and it's been working perfectly all weekend, apart from having to use CTRL-ALT-F3 and shutdown -h now as root to get it to turn off last night.
Dave F
