freezing problems

[Vincent Trouilliez]

On Tue, 2005-05-24 at 08:03 -0400, Matt Patterson wrote:
> You may simply have a failed video card. If you have tried both drivers, 
> turned acceleration and agp off on both (this includes trying the 
> hardware and software cursor options, and dri is acceleration), then you 
> may have a card with bad memory. I had a rage 128 that would freeze the 
> computer for no reason at random times, turned out it was a dud of a card.

I second that. No experience on my own/personal machine, but I used to
work for a computer factory (Nec/Packard-bell), who supply the world
minus the US, about 20,000 desktop machines per week. The machines once
assembled went through about 3 hours of "test" (basically video test,
then memory and hard drive test, then installing XP and all the end-user
apps), and apart from the odd CPU that overheated because the assembler
didn't put the heat sink properly on it, 99% of all machines that would
freeze for no apparent reason, did so due to a faulty video card. Most
of the time ATI Radeon cards, sometimes low end TNT Nvidia cards. The
video cards did go through a 5 or 10 minute stress test program supplied
by the manufacturer, but most of them times, the cards would pass the
test successfully, and only fail once warmed up, after an hour or two,
when in the middle of installing windows...

HTH


--
Vince