This beast has a radeon card in it and I have the non free driver 
installed.  The interesting thing is that I didn't have the locking up 
problem when I ran xp on it.  The other machine I have has an nvidia 
8400GS in it.   I'm told there was a fault with that series that caused 
them to lock up at random.  It ran just fine under Kubuntu 8.4 but when 
I tried to upgrade to anything newer than that, It locked up.

The newer beast is an HP pavillion p6-2003w.  I bought it a year ago.  
It came with 4GB of RAM.  I bought a new 4GB stick and replaced the old 
one with it.  The problem was still there.  HP only supports windoze on 
this beast.  So for all I know there may be some crap parts in it that 
work on windoze but not so well on linux.  When I buy my next machine 
I'll decide what I want in it. Then I'll look to make sure all the 
hardware is compatible with linux.  I've read about people having 
trouble with finding linux drivers for some hardware.  Then I'll go to 
Fry's and buy the parts.

On 01/07/2013 08:05 PM, Michael Butash wrote:
> Last time that happened to me under linux, the video card was on the 
> fritz.  Got worse enough it finally just died (mass distortion of 
> display on boot), replaced it, and never locked up again.  I've had 
> memory (ram) cause this kind of thing, saw a crappy WD external drive 
> enclosure do it too (pc bios wouldn't boot with it connected either, 
> replaced enclosure).  Most hard locks I always suspect hardware now.
>
> I bet largely it's using a different driver, or it's not loading a 
> video driver to use gpu.  As long as something isn't using a feature, 
> the system doesn't lock.  GPU went out on my laptop where as soon as 
> compiz kicked in, the display would wig out, but using 2d/safemode 
> only was just fine.  I think you might have a similar problem.
>
> -mb
>
>
> On 01/07/2013 07:25 PM, Derek Trotter wrote:
>> This machine had ssh installed. When I say it locked up, it locked up.
>> Nothing worked. Ssh wouldn't work. Http wouldn't work. It just stopped
>> responding to anything.
>>
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-- 
"I get my copy of the daily paper, look at the obituaries page, and if I'm not there, I carry on as usual."

Patrick Moore