Unexpected freezes in Maverick

[Mark]

On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 12:23 AM, Carsten Agger <agger at modspil.dk> wrote:
> 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.
>
You might try running the System Monitor applet so you can see if that
also stops dead - might not be any help, but it might tell you that
something is just hammering your CPU as opposed to the system actually
being dead.