[ILUG] Fedora Crashes

[Brendan Minish]

On Fri, 2009-03-06 at 23:02 +0000, Conor Mac Aoidh wrote: 
> Hi,
> 
> Today I have been getting a lot of computer crashes.

First thing I would do is run a full memtest86, it's on the fedora
install disk I think. usually faults show up early on in the testing but
not always so run the full test at least once.  
If you have a memory fault this would be a cause, sometimes you can get
lucky and reseating a faulty memory stick can clear the problem but it's
not usually that easy! 

What hardware / motherboard / Graphics etc have you got ?

All add on cards seated properly ?

is the filesystem ok and the hard disk passes smartctl -a /dev/sda ?
does dmesg or the system log show any oddities ?

are the lockups load related ? If they only happen under high load
perhaps something is over clocked or there are power related issues. I
have seen issues where failing power supplies (either system PSU or on
board regulators ) can do things like this.
Any bulging capacitors on the motherboard? 

Are the cooling fans all working, including the one on the northbridge
(if any) ? 

if you boot off a live CD / USB stick do you still have issues ? 
If you revert to open source graphics drivers is it stable ? 

Fedora 10 has been very,very stable for me here both on I386 and X86_64
platforms, KDE and gnome 

.brendan