ubuntu jaunty seized up

[Brian McKee]

On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 12:34 AM, prad <prad at towardsfreedom.com> wrote:
> i've recently installed jaunty on a compaq presario sr1920nx. i only
> have 512M of ram, but it is still running quite acceptably - faster
> than it did with debian 5.0 which surprised me.
>
> last night the entire system froze - can't move mouse, no response from
> keyboard ... nothing. so i had to off-on the machine. it froze during
> an install of gnome-office and i had claws-mail, firefox and emacs
> running at the time.
>
> is there anyway to find out what went wrong?
> are there log error files that can tell me what happened?
>
> i am assuming the problem has to do with not having more memory, but i
> don't know if that is correct.

If I was to *guess* I'd say it was likely nothing to do with the
amount of your RAM at all.
A hard crash like that rarely leaves any traces of what went wrong.
As Ioannis pointed out, make sure you have swap enabled and working.

I'd be guessing overheating or poor power supply (your hardware or the
wall, could be either)
Have you cleaned the dust bunnies out of the case lately?  Are all
your fans spinning like they should be?
Temperatures ok?  Worth checking.

You will need to see if it happens again and try and find a pattern.

Brian