Problems with my Ubuntu Box

[David Whyte]

Hi all,

Sorry to those that frequent the IRC channel and who are likely sick
of my and my problems by now.  I am posting in an email because I need
to describe such a lot.  I hope you readon as I am sure there are
knowledgable people who can help me.

A couple of weeks ago, I started having problems with my Ubuntu Breezy
box hard-locking up, not responsing to mouse movement, keystroked, SSH
or HTTP.  The only way to get the box alive again was a hard-reboot.
The hardlockups only seem to occur when I want to use the box.  I.e.,
I can view HTML from work fine, but when I get home and play, it might
lockup.

At about (but not exactly from what I remember) the time it all
started happening, two things had happened:
1) I had bought a UPS and plugged (only) the tower into it and
compiled the mgt software for it.  This involved apt-getting a couple
of dev libs.
2) Software Mgr pushed out a newer revision of my kernel upgrading
from 2.6.12.9 to 1.6.12.10.

I immediately assumed the UPS was at fault, so unplugged its USB cable
and removed the software I installed.  A day later and I got the
hard-lockup.  I then decided it must be a problem with the kernel and
after much research and debate, decided the only fix was to go to
Dapper, which up-rev'd my kernel to 2.6.15.26.

Somehours after the Dapper install finsihed and I rebooted the issue
occurred, so I did a memtest and let it run twice with no errors.
This morning I used the PC fine after it had been on all night but
within 10 minutes of leaving my house I got a phone call to say it had
locked up.

This afternoon when I rebooted it, it didn't load up properly and I
got the error message "Out of Scan Range' in a blue box.  Apparently,
this could be caused when X doesn't recognise the monitor settings or
something, but the monitor did not change.  A quick reboot and here I
am now, but for how long.

At the same time, I have been getting the odd 'segfault' with my
mythTV frontend which runs on this box.  Even with verbose logging,
there no indication of what the error might be, and nothing has
changed in regard to my mythTV installation.

I have come to the conclusion that this is a hardware fault, but I am
unsure what it might be.  I was thinking this morning I should just
take out each stick of RAM one by one and see if any of those are
causing the fault, but with the 'out of range' message I got today, I
am wandering if perhaps the Mobo is on its way out.  The problem with
these 'tests' is it can soemtimes go a while without the lockup
happening, but I guess this is the only way to find out.

For the record, it is a crappy GameDude bare-box PC I bought a couple
of years ago, with:
- Jetway V2DP Mobo
- Sempron 2400 CPU
- 1x256 generic ram
- 1x512 genenric ram
- 3x DVB-T tuners
- 2x HDD.

I know this is a long email, but I really am at the end of my wits and
with no idea on how to go forward.  Can anybody give me some advice?

Many many thanks,
Whytey