Computer freezes randomly, need help finding a cause, and hopefully a solution

[pmheideman]

My HP DM1Z has been freezing since I installed Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit on it. I'm dual booting with Windows 7 64 bit, and though I don't use it super often, I have no freezing problems with windows. At first I thought the problem in Ubuntu was related to the wifi, since it always seemed to happen when I was either downloading something or using firefox. However, in the last few days it has happened even when I have the wifi turned off. Last night I did a fresh install, hoping this would take care of whatever was the matter. Unfortunately it did not, and I've had two freezes today. It's an extremely hard freeze, immune to magic REISUB. It happens once or twice a day, and I have to do a hard reset each time. Not exactly easy on the hard drive, so I'm eager to get it fixed.

If anyone has any suggestions for how to go about troubleshooting this, I'd really appreciate it.

[dragonfly41]

I am in dual boot configuration (Vista + Ubuntu 10.10).

In Ubuntu I now run Firefox in safe mode which seems to reduce the frequency of crashes.

Go to Firefox toolbar > Help > Restart with Add-ons Disabled

and select Safe Mode after Firefox restarts.

I've moved my Firefox plugins out of the mozilla folder into a backup folder.

You could try enabling Add-ons or Plugins one at a time to see if any is the problem.

Or you could try Opera instead of Firefox.

Flash seems to be one suspect. Do you access flash sites?

You might try bleachbit to clean out caches.

[ajgreeny]

Could be all sorts of reasons.

Have you run memtest86+ from grub? If not do so and leave it running for several hours, or overnight, and look for any error notes on the bottom line. You have to manually stop the test as it runs until stopped.

Alternatively make sure you have the correct and most up-to-date video drivers for your graphic card, as bad drivers can also cause this type of freeze.

Power supply may be the next thing to check, but I have no idea how to do that from within a ubuntu or windows OS..

[pmheideman]

Thanks for the replies! I'll try running memtest tonite and see what comes up. That's pretty nasty if firefox is causing whole system crashes. Is there any good way to find out what process it was that locked everything up?

[LinGNUbie]

I have had this happen a few times, and as I am always tinkering with older hardware, it seemed to be a piece of hardware going into failure such as a HD, NIC, or other device. Just something to think about.

[pmheideman]

Memtest reports no errors. There seems to be a lot of discussion here of this bug, but there's not much I can take from it: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...7?comments=all