Total lock up, freeze, of 13.10 OS

[ubfan1]

I did try the 304.108 nvidia driver, same crash, so that was no help. I can live with the problem though, so guess I'll upgrade to 14.04 when it's out rather than drop back to 12.04.

[sudodus]

Yes it could be the video card, once I know how to get at the logs, I can perhaps find out. Being very new to Ubuntu I have a great deal to learn. In the meantime, I'm running 12.04 LTS which so far is fine. I'll probably stick with this until 13.10 is declared LTS.

I still want to know what causes the crash though!

13.10 will never be declared LTS. Its lifetime is only 9 months. The next version, Trusty Tahr, will be released as 14.04 LTS in April (and will get long time support (which is the meaning of the acronym LTS). But there might be another problem. Support for some hardware is dropped along the road to new versions, that are made to support new hardware. For this reason it is a good idea to run an ageing but well supported LTS release like Ubuntu 12.04.