I have an Pentium M notebook currently with 512 MB of RAM with an Nvidia GeForce Go 6800 256 MB GPU and have configured it to dual boot into either Kubuntu 6.10 or WinXP, the latter of I which I mainly use for games. These last two days, my computer has been freezing every now and then. When this first started to occur, I was using WinXP. I have no viruses, spyware, cpu monopolizing malware, etc. on my WinXP partition. As linux has always been the cure to anything wrong that ever happens to me on WinXP, I restarted and booted into Edgy. It was running fine until a couple of minutes later, when the same kind of slowdown starting happening in Edgy, too. This has been happening in both OSes occaisionally these past 2 days, with having Edgy freeze on me once! If my system doesn't freeze, it usually takes very long for the screen to refresh.
I reasoned that I may have a hardware problem and suspect either my memory, hard drive, or GPU acting up. I ran memtest86+ v1.65 over 10+ passes and had zero errors. The reason that I suspect my graphics card is because I was playing Oblivion (a hefty game for a GeForce 6 series card) for several hours at a time, which led to severe overheating under certain regions of my notebook. My hard drive spins at 5400 RPM, has been defragmented, and is frequently read to and written to since I download lots of stuff. Is this a problem because I own a Dell, given how cheap their reputation is?
I need help on isolating which of my hardware components is causing these random performance hits. Or whether if the problem is even on the hardware side at all. Any way to go about this? Any programs or utilities useful in this kind of a situation?
I reasoned that I may have a hardware problem and suspect either my memory, hard drive, or GPU acting up. I ran memtest86+ v1.65 over 10+ passes and had zero errors. The reason that I suspect my graphics card is because I was playing Oblivion (a hefty game for a GeForce 6 series card) for several hours at a time, which led to severe overheating under certain regions of my notebook. My hard drive spins at 5400 RPM, has been defragmented, and is frequently read to and written to since I download lots of stuff. Is this a problem because I own a Dell, given how cheap their reputation is?
I need help on isolating which of my hardware components is causing these random performance hits. Or whether if the problem is even on the hardware side at all. Any way to go about this? Any programs or utilities useful in this kind of a situation?
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