Four Crashes in a Day

The last time my computer crashed (that is totally froze up) was back in May. Today I have had four freezes with in hours of each other and I am pointing the finger at Fedora 10.

Twice the machine crashed when it went to sleep. If the computer sleeps, it doesn't wake up again. The screen gets garbled and there is no response to mouse and keyboard entry. Interestingly it can still be pinged. I have temporarily disabled power management to work around this. Power management didn't work perfectly for me in Fedora 9 either but this is just crazy. That means I can't keep the computer running all the time as I usually do but it's not running all the time anyway - crashing all the time is a more apt description.

The other couple of times the machine crashed it was for no apparent reason at all. On one occasion I was just browsing. There was nothing running that could even remotely be thought of as being demanding of system resources. Yet the machine froze up it would respond to the mouse though. At least you could move the mouse pointer around on but clicking had no effect. During this crash I could actually SSH into this computer from my Macbook. I reckoned this is just X that's crashing and tried to enter runlevel 3. Though the init 3 command was accepted and no error produced the screen didn't even change.

I tried killing off all processes that looked even remotely like being associated with xorg or Gnome to no avail. The OS refused to respond to anything. Even Windows, inspite of all it's problems isn't really this bad. I am willing to concede that this might be because of faulty installation media (I do have Fedora 10 running without any problems on my File Server). I didn't test the media before installation (who does?) the installer usually bails out when it finds corrupt RPMs (I have seen it happen). I doubt if it's faulty hardware either. This machine is pretty new.