> Frank Cox wrote:
> > On Tue, 17 Apr 2007 19:08:48 +0100
> > Al Graziano <al.graziano@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> >> Maybe, but I should still be able to trace it. I just want to
> >> troubleshoot the problem and identify the root cause
> >>
> >> Any idea on what to look for/at
> >
> > You could boot a Freedos disk on it and start running a DOS program that loads
> > the CPU and see if it the beeps/lockups/whatever happen then.
> >
> > If the problem continues, it's a hardware or power issue.
>
> If it is anything like the Firefox problem on my wife's machine, it is
> not hardware or power. The X session and everything else is solid for
> days on end. Just Firefox terminates unexpectedly, sometimes when the
> machine is not in use. Sometimes after 30 minutes sometimes after many
> hours.
>
> -Andy
I've had the same experience as Andy, variations on losing the display, having
it lock-up, etc., most frequently when the box was under heavy I/O load (
e.g. using
Azureus for bittorrent transfers).
If you can, try ssh'ing into the frozen box from another computer -- if it is this problem
a "top" will show "X" using 99% of CPU. I only rarely can kill X in this situation, but
at least you can shutdown/restart the box cleanly from the ssh session.
Fix in my case was to disable most of the advanced features of the
video driver in the X configuration file.
