After building and maintaining PC's for as long as I have, there is 
still one VERY common problem that I continue to overlook. The power 
supply.

Not only do most people forget to consider that when adding new drives, 
ram or updating their processor, but they can also slowly go bad and 
provide flaky power to your machine. This often leads to unpredictable 
and unexplainable errors, crashes and lockups.

Post what type and wattage of power supply you have, and how many drives 
(hard drives, cd/dvd), memory, etc in your machine. Do you have lots of 
USB peripherals, etc? Anything that uses power (at least a significant 
amount...don't tell me you have a keyboard :).

Then either take a spare one that you or a buddy owns that you KNOW will 
be powerful enough and is working properly. You aren't really a nerd 
unless you have at least one spare. Maybe it's in another machine. Turn 
it off and tear out it's power supply. Run your machine for a while (the 
longer the better) with the "new" power supply in there and see if that 
helps.

If so, go buy yourself a power supply and rejoice at your newly 
functional machine. If not...well...we've all seen "Office Space".

Dan Drake wrote:
> I'm running Ubuntu and for some time now, I've had a big problem with it
> locking up. The machine simply won't run for more than 8-10 hours
> without locking up. It just freezes, completely, and there's nothing in
> the logs to suggest what went wrong.
>
> Sometimes it locks up after a little while, sometimes it goes all day.
> This has been happening since summer and all this month, so heat is not
> a problem.
>
> It seemed like a memory problem, but I ran memtest86 overnight (about 40
> passes total) and it showed no errors. So it seems like a kernel bug, or
> a problem with the motherboard. Any suggestions on how to track down the
> problem?
>
> I upgraded to Edgy Eft, since that has a new kernel, but an hour
> after getting that going, it locked up just like before.
>
> This is very irritating. I use a Windows machine sometimes at work and
> it's very depressing to see it run continuously for a week or more with
> no problems while my Linux box crashes about once a day!
>
> Here's some specs:
>
>   MSI KM3M-V motherboard
>   Sempron 1.75GHz cpu
>   2 512MB sticks of Crucial RAM
>
> Suggestions for how to track down the problem? Thanks.
>
> Dan
>
>   
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota
> tclug-list at mn-linux.org
> http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list
>   

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