Seems to work, but crashes after 30 minutes or so

[bradjackson5]

Or at least I think it's crashing. The screen goes black, then into power saving mode. The HDD activity light flickers for some time, and during this time the numlock and scroll lock (but not caps lock) keys on the keyboard will change the status of the keyboard LED's. After a few minutes of this the system will eventually change to a new behavior where none of the keyboard LED's change when I hit any of the lock keys. Sometimes it reboots after this, other times it doesn't.

I'm fairly sure it isn't a hardware problem, I have Win7 set up as a dual boot and it works fine for days.

I was lazy and delaying my update to 11.04 and running 10.04 until recently, and the problem first manifested after running updates on 10.04. I'd hoped that upgrading to 11.04 would fix things but unfortunately the problem continued even after a fresh install of 11.04.

Thanks for any help.

[dibl]

Re: Seems to work, but crashes after 30 minutes or so

I am going to suggest the first thing to look at is a thermal problem. Linux does not use the same power management drivers as Windows, so it could be getting hotter with Linux than with Windows. Install lm-sensors, run

sudo sensors-detect

, and then use one of the monitors (gkrellm, conky, or others) or just use your KDE widget to monitor the CPU temps.

[bradjackson5]

Re: Seems to work, but crashes after 30 minutes or so

Did as you suggested and k10temp-pci-00c3 (the CPU I think?) is showing a bit less than 40c.

nouveau-pci-0100 (maybe my Nvidia graphics card) is showing a climbing temp 115c to 120c so far. Which seems really high.

[dibl]

Re: Seems to work, but crashes after 30 minutes or so

nouveau-pci-0100 (maybe my Nvidia graphics card) is showing a climbing temp 115c to 120c so far. Which seems really high.

Yes, consumer electronics should never exceed about 85 degrees C. That's obviously the source of the thermal shutdown. I'm not sure what would cause that -- the Nouveau driver obviously is not handling something correctly.

[bradjackson5]

Re: Seems to work, but crashes after 30 minutes or so

Well, it's good to know what the problem is.

Perhaps I should try the closed source nvidia drivers? I'll give that a shot and see if it changes anything.

[bradjackson5]

Re: Seems to work, but crashes after 30 minutes or so

I feel stupid.

I just used some canned air and blew out a rather impressive quantity of dust bunnies. Temp has been holding steady at 68c for the past hour or so. That's still 7 degrees higher than it was under Win7, but it does appear I had a self generated hardware problem rather than a software problem.

The combination of it happening after my upgrade and Win7 not having the same problem lead me to a wrong conclusion.

Thanks for the help and sorry to have bothered you.

[bradjackson5]

Re: Seems to work, but crashes after 30 minutes or so

After installing the proprietary Nvidia drivers they're reporting a temp of 62c, roughly what I got in Win7.

So I'm guessing the original problem was a combination of my poor maintenance and the resulting dust buildup and the open drivers handling power management in a way that just couldn't deal with the dust buildup.

Again, thanks for all the advice and help.