> Well, yes, it can be a hardware failure, but then it's a >rather strange coincidence that the crashes started >happening immediately I do IT for small businesses, and I fix just these sorts of problems. And I can tell you from experience - these kinds of coincidences happen fairly often. In any case, it always comes down to software or hardware, or both. The hardware is easy - just follow these steps: 1) Open the case and look for stopped or slowly turning fans. Including: cpu fans, case fans, and the fans inside the PSU. 2) Clean dust from the cpu & video card heat sinks if necessary. 3) While looking in the case, look for bad capacitors on the motherboard and inside the PSU. Click on the pictures to see close up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague 4) If you're using two or more sticks of ram and the sticks are mismatched, try buying matched pairs. Also, look at the sticker on the ram and see if they require that their voltage be set higher than normal. 5) Inside the PSU, look closely at the mid-sized capacitors where the external wires are soldered to the circuit board. (external wires meaning those that connect to the mainboard and drives) Also, look at the PSU circuit board and its components for indication of high heat. For example, brown areas on the circuit board indicating that something is getting too hot. Components like resistors and rectifiers can get too hot and burn the area around them. Sometimes you'll see black charring where a component has caught on fire. There are no dangerous voltages inside the PSU as long as the power cord is unplugged from the wall. But be sure to unplug from the wall, or you will learn quickly never to do it a second time. 6) If everything looks good so far, put it all back together and run ramtest86+ for a few passes. The more the better. 7) Boot a live cd and read the smart data for the drive(s): use the gnome disk utility (palimpsest), or use smartctl -a /dev/sda, etc. (substitute your actual device) If Reallocated Sectors is more than 0 (zero) the drive is failing. This counts confirmed sector read/write errors. The sectors are disabled by reallocating them. As new bad sectors occur, the computer can freeze or reboot, or programs can crash. Of course, even if your system passes all those tests, there can still be a bad mainboard or other part. But if it does pass all that, look seriously at your OS - it could be software problem. -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
