Re: [Sheflug] Crashing software

[Alex Hudson <home@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi David,

On Sun, 2007-01-07 at 20:33 +0000, david wrote:
> The main offender is open
> office, which crashes most times I use it. It rescues itself and crashes
> without warning. I'm using it only for simple 1 page letters and tiny
> spreadsheets. The second worst offender is firefox which will crash a
> few times a day, again without warning and with no obvious trigger.
> Sometimes the X server goes down (perhaps a couple of times a week) and
> I'm left at a login page, and occasionally the system reboots
> althogether. RealPlayer also crashes once or twice a day. The system's
> being updated as often as necessary via the package manager. Everything
> else seems OK, and I'm logged on as a normal user, except for doing
> things needing root privileges.

That honestly doesn't really sound like a software issue. Check that you
don't have accessibility support turned on (unless you need it, in which
case, d'oh!) - I found that can make things instable.

But otherwise, it sounds more like you have dodgy RAM or some other
hardware problem to me :(

I know you've tested with memtest86, but that doesn't catch all possible
RAM errors (though it is pretty good), and it could be something else. 

Sadly, I'm not really aware of any good burn test software that's free
software - perhaps we should write some!! - but if you google, you can
find some for other OSes.

I would definitely be thinking hardware, though. Is there anything you
know you do which triggers apps to crash, or does it seem to be totally
at random? 

I would also try swapping out/turning off some more hardware, if you
can. Perhaps also go into the BIOS, and turn some of the volume knobs
down: make the buses slower, RAM slower, that kind of thing. 

Hope that helps,

Alex.


_______________________________________________
        Sheffield Linux User's Group
  http://wwww.sheflug.org.uk/mailfaq.html
 GNU - The choice of a complete generation