Now wait a minute, not everyone has $100k to spend on a brand new laptop. I'm a student, and I have a single computer to last me through two years of highschool and and at least a few years of college, and there's no way I'm going to screw up my computer without some insurance, ok? Before I run anything on this machine, I'm going to make sure that I'm still under warrantee, whether the parts are user servicable or not. Now if you call that being silly, then that's your choice, but it's my choice if I want to be cautious, even overly so.
On that note, I did buck up and run memtest86+ from a Ubuntu livecd, and after several loops (about 1h 30 min of straight testing) I didn't get a single error. It was on Test #6 when I stopped, so I think the memory's chill. Besides, as I said before, when I run anything GUI (enlightement, right now), it's fine. I just have to jump in and out of terminal really quickly. The fact that it likes to crash after starting x server twice makes me think I might have a few damaged portions on my harddrive. Does that sound about right? Of course, that sounds like it could be a kernel issue too. If I can figure out how to "downgrade" my kernel, maybe that will solve it. I just clicked the "<<plain text" button and the setting has held for this entire thread. Come to think of it, I may have actually converted it back to Rich Text a few weeks back. -Peter On 5/15/07, Peter Hoff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
----- Original Message ---- From: Peter Davoust <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [email protected] Sent: Monday, May 14, 2007 7:11:20 PM Subject: Re: [gentoo-amd64] Gentoo crashing? I know it doesn't actually burn the cpu, but I'd rather not cook any components if I don't have to. From what I know of torture tests, they run the cpu so hot it starts making computational errors, am I right? It still makes me nervous. I was hoping to be able to fix the issue just by recompiling my kernel, but no such luck. I'll mess with it some more and see what I can do. Can you give me any advice as to what I should to to a) not violate my warrantee and b) avoid killing my computer as much as possible? Could it just be something with my Gentoo install? I guess that's a stupid question; I've had this problem on an older computer, but it was a Desktop and it was much easier to swap components without messing up my warrantee. So if it were a hardware problem, wouldn't you think that suse 10.2 would have run into it as well? I used to run 10.2 (used to as in 3 days ago) for hours on end without any problems at all. I agree that Gentoo can run the computer harder, but that doesn't quite click. -Peter You're being silly. Software torture tests are not going to kill your hardware. Just run them and see what you get. Memtest will give you the address where the error occured, and I've always been able to determine which stick was bad from that, using a little deductive reasoning (I usually verify by testing the sticks alone, but so far I've not been wrong). As for voiding your warranty, memory and the hard drive are typically considered user-servicable parts. In fact, most of the time if either of those are the problem they'll just send you the parts and you'll have to replace them yourself anyway. More on torturing hardware: really, the only component that's at all vulnerable to this is the hard drive, simply because it's a mechanical device, but it will take an absurdly long time to do any actual damage. I used to test hard drives for video servers (think Tivo, but starting at $100k). We tried a wide variety of drive testing suites, but it turned out none of them ran the drives harder than our normal application. A surprising number of the oldest version of our product are still running, on the original drives, after over 10 years, in situations that are very demanding (like serving multiple channels for DirecTV). So, really, stop being so paranoid about software torture tests. It is a complete myth that you can ruin your hardware by running them.
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