More help requested

[Li Li]

On Sun, 2010-10-31 at 03:22 -0500, Anthony Papillion wrote:
> Hello Everyone,
> 

> First, here is my hardware:
> 
> Acer 5100 Laptop
> AMD Turon 64 X2 TL-50 Processor (1.6Ghz)
> 3GB RAM
> 120HD
> ATI Radeon XPress 1100
> Ubuntu Linux 10.04 LTS
> 
> Originally, I installed Ubuntu on the internal hard disk drive. I kept
> experiencing freezes with the screen filling with upright gray and black
> bars. At that point the computer would have to be manually rebooted by
> pressing and holding the power button.
> 
> After some poking around, I determined that there was a bad area of the
> internal hard disk drive and installed Ubuntu on a new, removable 120
> Maxtor USB drive. Things seemed to work fine.
> 
> However, sometimes, and this regularly happens after a few minutes to a
> few hours of use, the system will stop responding.  The wifi signal
> locator will turn to a red circle with a horizontal "-" sign in it and
> when I click it, the entire thing is filled with little [][][][][]
> instead of text.
> 
> At that point, even though the mouse is still active, programs stop
> responding and the system must be rebooted by holding down the power
> key. Once rebooted, things will run fine for a while and then it will
> happen again.

First, I think, you have to sort out if this is software or hardware or
a combination of the two.

Some questions:

Is this with 10.10, 10.04 or some older version?

Have you tried using a liveCD or usb and running just from that?

What is on the internal HD now, and does it work normally, i.e. does
this behavior occur only with Ubuntu?  Have you tried some other distro
(maybe some small and simple like CrunchBang), or Windows on the
internal HD?

What happens if you disable wireless and work on a wired network?

With 3 GB of ram you have two or more SODIMS.  Have you tried removing
one, or swapping them around?

Are you using NetworkManager, wicd, something else?

I don't know much about ATI video, so others will have to help with
that, but what sort of video driver are you using and have you tried
reverting to what you had when you first installed?

We've got several Acer 5000 series laptops of varying ages here; thev've
been wonderfully durable and easy to fix/upgrade (for laptops).  It's
trivial to open up the panels on the bottom to replace hard drives and
memory.  


-- 
Lilly
godbless --everyone --no-exceptions
Linux 2.6.35-22-generic Linux Mint 10 Julia, Gnome 2.32.0