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    #1

    System Freezes

    I've been running SuSE 10.0 for over a year. Just before Christmas, display went faint and colours were all wrong. Monitor was shown to be fine with another PC and it wasn't an OS issue as the screen was faint during BIOS boot screens.

    I replaced the video card with an old ATI Rage 128 that I had kicking around and re-installed using Kubuntu Edgy Eft. Everything is working fine except that I still seem to be having video issues.

    Initially, I was unable to recover from monitor sleep (DPMS) or screensavers. The monitor wouldn't come out of sleep or the screensaver wouldn't stop. So I turned off all screensavers within KDE.

    Now I note that the system is freezing. The mouse doesn't move and no response from the keyboard. No wonder it wouldn't recover from the screensaver. The freezes seem to happen erratically. I can go hours without a problem and then the system will freeze requiring a hard reboot.

    I'm really at a loss for what to investigate on this. Any help is appreciated!
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    #2
    Re: System Freezes

    Try using your "Performance Monitor" which is one of the standard programs under the "System" menu above KStart. It seems that you should be able to open the list of processes tab and leave it open on your desktop where you can see it when the freezup happens. Possibly you will be able to observe which process is going berserk. Or perhaps your mouse is dead and you won't be able to scroll down the window. I don't know -- I'm just a noob too, but that's what I would do.
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      #3
      Re: System Freezes

      Quanta626,

      This sounds like an over heating problem.

      Questions:
      - What CPU are you using: cat /proc/cpuinfo

      - Have you or anyone else over clocked the CPU? Over clocked CPUs run hot.
      A CPU can be over clocked on *some* motherboard BIOS
      so I would reset the BIOS to 'Default', see if that helps.

      - Is it only during screen saver that the computer freezes?
      Some screen savers can be CPU intensive which would cause the CPU to heat up.


      To test for/confirm heat problems you could take the cover off of the side of the computer and point a desk fan at the motherboard for extra cooling.

      Thats my guess anyway.




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        #4
        Re: System Freezes

        PSB is probably right, or possibly you need to check and see if your PSU is dying - sometimes they start having intermittent power drops before completely giving up the ghost.

        If you've had your system for a year then your processor probably is not a Core 2 Duo, but if it is, you need to know about this:

        https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Core_2_Duo_Support
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          #5
          Re: System Freezes

          CPU is a Pentium III Coppermine 600 MHz 256 KB cache so the core duo problem doesn't apply.

          The CPU has been overclocked by a previous owner long ago, but I have always run it at default. I will however turn the speed down and see if the problem goes away.

          I also appreciate dibls idea of leaving the process window viewable when the PC is unattended.

          I have noted that the PC is fine when in use. It always locks up once it is left unattended and generally a short time after. I therefore think this is a latent screensaver or power saving setting somewhere that crashes it.

          The PSU is new ( 1 yr) and overrated for the system. I believe 300+W. I have 1 CD-RW, the CPU, 80 GB IDE HD, 13 GB IDE HD, 15 GB IDE HD attached. If the system froze under load ( for example now, playing music, several firefox instances, thunderbird, downloading torrents), I'd suspect a heating or PSU issue more but it does seem to be when left unattended.

          I will look for how to ensure no X screensaver is occuring in xconf.

          Thanks for the points. Will keep this thread up to date...
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            #6
            Re: System Freezes

            Originally posted by Quanta626
            I will look for how to ensure no X screensaver is occuring in xconf.
            Enter [Alt][F2]xscreensaver-demo to access the configuration of the "core" screensaver (valid only for the user logged in).

            HTH
            Birdy
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              #7
              Re: System Freezes

              This command doesn't work for me so I musn't have the package installed and therefore X can't be the culprit right?
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                #8
                Re: System Freezes

                I would think so, too - you may however try more /etc/X11/xorg.conf | grep -i 'dpms' to check the X server's settings in relation to DPMS, which may or may not play it's part in this nasty game ...

                Birdy
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                  #9
                  Re: System Freezes

                  This did not yield any information. It ran without any output. I interpret this to mean that the problem cannot be traced to any dpms settings in X.

                  I'm now going to check the BIOS for any settings which may be related.

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