Crashing with Dell

[Jonathan Saylor]

Dennis,

   I don't know about the Precision 330 and Latitude D610 however my
partner at work has a Dell Insperion 1100 and was having it lock up on
without any consistancy as to when and why nearly identical to what you
are experiancing.  We have found that in the Insperion 1100 they used
"non-qualified" RAM for those motherboards (2 128MB sticks).  Intel
qualifies RAM for thier motherboards for a reason, Dell has a habbit of
ignoring it.  He replaced the RAM with what is qualified by INTEL for
that motherboard and the problem has gone away.  Now note, this RAM
worked perfectly fine in Windows and in other linux distros without
fail.  Ubuntu isn't the only distro he had THIS problem with just not all.

Jon


Dennis_Drescher at sil.org wrote:

>I've been using Ubuntu for a couple months now on both a Dell Precision 
>330 and a Latitude D610. Off and on I've had problems with what I'll call 
>hard crashes. What I mean is that the machine completely locks up and will 
>not allow me to take it down by going into a shell. The only way to 
>recover is to power down. This obviously wreaks havoc on my file structure 
>and I have to run fsck often to fix the partitions. The Latitude, which is 
>running Ubuntu 5.0.4 (with the KDE desktop installed) locks up 
>infrequently and it is hard to predict. The Precision 330 locks up several 
>times a day. Sometimes while I'm typing or using the mouse, many times 
>just while it is sits idle.
>
>I've used Linux for several years now and have never had such an unstable 
>system. I also run Kanotix on both machines in another partition and it 
>can run all day long with no problems. I've also run checks on my hardware 
>and I'm confident it is functioning okay. I'm thinking it might be a 
>problem with X but I'm not sure what to do at this point. Can anyone give 
>me some clues as to how to diagnose this? Thanks.
>
>Regards,
>
>Dennis
>
>
>  
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