Tired of freezing laptop

[Bart Silverstrim]

Pat Brown wrote:
> I'm getting very tired of having my PC freeze up almost every time I go 
> online. I'm using Hardy on a Compaq Presario C700, with a Broadcom B43 
> wireless card. I apply every update the update manager detects. I've 
> been running Hardy since it was released and this problem is ongoing. It 
> doesn't seem to matter what I am doing online, eventually it will freeze 
> and require a soft boot using CTRL+ALT+Backspace. I've run some of the 
> tests people have suggested but the results mean nothing to me - I 
> posted them once and never heard any comments on whether it showed anything.
> 
> I also can't watch YouTube videos at all on Konquerer. Sometimes I can 
> watch them on Firefox 3.0.1 but it too will shut down without warning.
> 
> I recently picked up an almost new PC which I was originally going to 
> install Ubuntu on. Now I'm reconsidering and think I'm going to go back 
> to XP so I can watch videos and surf without this hassle all the time. 
> I'll keep Ubuntu on my laptop because I like it, but I don't like this 
> problem and until it's fixed I need an alternative that's more reliable.

I didn't see your original thread, but a couple things to start with...

The freezing. You said ctl-alt-backspace brings the system back...that 
restarts X, not the system, so this would mean that it's actually the 
GUI you're restarting and not the system, is this accurate?

What shows up under /var/log/system.log? And what is output from dmesg?

Does the entire interface freeze, or do you still have *some* control? 
It would be handy if you could run something like the system monitor or 
in a terminal run "top" to see if they freeze up as well, because if 
not, it *might* show if a process is eating the CPU at %100 or if the 
swap is suddenly growing. I don't know if you have this capability but I 
diagnosed a problem like that before using a second computer that I 
secure-shelled into (if your system is running sshd, the 
opensshd-server) and ran top on from another system. The interface on 
the workstation froze, but background processes were still running fine 
so I could see the offending process (and kill it from the remote terminal).

The flash issue. I had this problem not long ago and as I recall my fix 
was the flashplugin-nonfree package. Using synaptic, do you have the 
package "flashplugin-nonfree" installed? I believe I could play  on the 
YouTubes once I had that package installed.

-Bart