My box no longer crashes, now that I have set the BIOS to use nonagressive settings. I'm now slowly changing the settings back the way they were one by one to isolate what it was, but I suspect that it's one of the memory settings. Many thanks to Derek and Brian for mentioning memory as a possible culprit. -- Warren Post Santa Rosa de Copan, Honduras http://www.srcopan.vze.com/
On Tue, 23 Apr 2002 13:08:27 -0600 Warren Post <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I can hardly believe it, but my 8.1 box crashes 4 or 5 times a day. My > wife, a devoted Windows fan, is laughing her head off. The symptoms > vary, so for all I know I may have multiple problems. They are: > > 1. The X server often crashes. I once had this problem when I ran out of > room on root, but df tells me I have 1.5G free now. In such cases I hold > ctrl-alt-del depressed until I can force a reboot. Is there a way to > restore a crashed X server short of rebooting? > > 2. Sometimes I am kicked out of my current session with no warning and > taken to the user login prompt. > > 3. The GUI often becomes unresponsive. The mouse works, but even > something as simple as a terminal can't open, and already open apps are > unresponsive. If I switch to tty1 and check top, invariably X is sucking > up all the CPU's cycles. (Again, all I know how to do in such cases is > reboot. Is there a more elegant solution?) > > 4. An extreme case of no. 3 is that neither the mouse nor the keyboard > work. I can usually manage to reboot by using advice previously posted > to this list, which is to depress in order Alt-SysRq-r, Alt-SysRq-t, > Alt-SysRq-s, Alt-SysRq-b. That is supposed to perform a graceful > shutdown, but in fact upon reboot the filesystem always has to be > repaired. > > Those are the symptoms, now here are a few observations and notes: > > A. The system is less stable when I use light applications and windows > managers vs. heavy ones. For example, I crash more often in IceWM than > in KDE. I crash more often using Sylpheed than using Evolution. > > B. The system only crashes when I am actively working on it. I've left > it run XMMS, efax, and such for two days without touching it. No > problem. But it can't last for even a couple of hours of answering > email, word processing, and so forth. > > C. Other than A I haven't detected any particular applications that make > my system more or less stable. I've tried different email clients, > browsers, word processors, spreadsheets, etc., in search of some > patterns, and conclude that the crashes don't seem to be related to any > user application. > > D. My installation is LM 8.1 with the stock kernel, 2.4.8-26mdk, and > XFree86 3.3.6. My video adaptor is a SiS 620. > > Does anyone have any clues to help me track down the source of my > crashes? What should I be looking at?
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