[Novalug] computer appears to freeze up.

[Jay Berkenbilt]

Bonnie Dalzell <bdalzell at qis.net> wrote:

> every now and then the computer greezes up.
>
> i have a athlon with 512 mg of memory and ubuntu hardy with the gnome 
> desktop.
>
> every now and then - usually when firefox is running the comuter (or at 
> least the mouse and keyboard are frozen and i have to do a cold boot 
> to restart (it hi reset button on computer).
>
> any ideas what may be going??
>
> i have been trying to run "top" in the background to see if I could get 
> some insight into this behavior but so far I have not had it freeze up 
> when i could see top running.

If the computer had previously been working fine, try replacing the
power supply.  I have had at least half a dozen systems over the years
exhibit this problem when the power supply is going bad.  The first
someone suggested that, I thought it didn't really make much sense,
but I've seen it happen again and again, so now it's one of the first
things I check.

--Jay