Unexpected freezes in Maverick

[Carsten Agger]

I'm using Maverick Meerkat on an old(-ish) MSI Megabook S271 with an old 
Radeon Xpress graphics card onboard.

Recently (yesterday, or day before) the system has started freezing 
unexpectedly - no cursor movement, no reaction to hotkey combinations, 
nothing. Only pressing the power button helps.

It might be the mother board getting old/doing strange things, but 
perhaps it might also be the system ...? It seems to be associated with 
high system load, especially opening programs. After a reboot I can't 
find anything suspicious in the logs.

Does anyone know how I continue from here in an attempt to diagnose the 
problem? I'd really like to know if there's a kernel bug or something 
that causes the freeze, as it's causing me to lose work right now.

best regards,

Carsten Agger,
Denmark