constant freezing

[tom_d]

Hardybeta/3.5.9

for the past week or so my machine is constantly freezing up mid-whatever-I'm-doing (not doing anything out of the ordinary, which is very ordinary user-level stuff)

reset button doesn't work (reboots, but blue thingy just travels back and forth with no hdd activity)
hold-power-button-kill-dead-start-again does (reboots and starts normally, no glitches)

everytime

when it comes back, my TBird icon (and only that one) in Panel has been replaced by 'ghost' icon (invisible, but tooltips 'Tbird' on mouseover and opens a 'new install' setup wizard. I delete it, and add application > internet > TBird- gives me real icon which opens 'my' TBird, mailboxes intact, all that good stuff.

Occasionally it also wipes out a couple of weeks worth of Konsole input (up-arrow to command history jumps way back)

When I start FFox 3B5, hd clatters away for perhaps 10-15 seconds before program shows up.

all of which I put in for context. I have no idea if this is hard- or software issue

My question is: would behaviour like this be logged anywhere so I can (I can ask you folks for help, more like it ... :-) diagnose what's going on here?

thanks

[jayhawk]

Re: constant freezing

What I normally do in situations like this is to check what processes are taking up the most CPU. You can do this in the Konsole by using the command 'top' (without the quotes). You might also want to take a look at /var/log and check out anything that gets logged there. You can do a 'ls -ltr /var/log' in the Konsole and it will list out the files in timestamp order so you can see what was most recently updated. dmesg might help also.

You might also want to check this link out:
http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/inde...opic=3089900.0
It give some other tips (file checking, disk management tools) that might help.

[dibl]

Re: constant freezing

reset button doesn't work (reboots, but blue thingy just travels back and forth with no hdd activity)
hold-power-button-kill-dead-start-again does (reboots and starts normally, no glitches)

@tom your data will have a vastly improved chance of survival if you will do your emergency restarts like this:

http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/inde...opic=3088251.0