annoying problem in 12.04

[Joep L. Blom]

On 18/01/14 17:16, compdoc wrote:
>> "restarting now.." and then the whole system was unresponsive.
>> Anybody has ideas?
>
>
> Computers have several common points of failure. The main ones are  the
> power supply, the motherboard, RAM, cooling fans, and the hard drive.
>
> Fans are easy - just make sure they are spinning at the proper speed. This
> includes the fan inside the PSU.
>
> If the motherboard is a few years old, it can develop bad capacitors. They
> are easy to spot when you open the case. Any caps that are rounded on top or
> leaking, are bad.  If so, replace the motherboard. Here are some sample
> pictures:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague
>
> Cheap power supplies often develop bad caps inside too but it might be
> dangerous to open the PSU, so just swap it out to test. RAM you can test for
> free by booting memtest86 and letting the tests run overnight.
>
> The hard drive is easy: there's no need to run any tests - you just read the
> drive's SMART info. It records when sectors are failing, and when other bad
> things happen.
>
> If you need help with the SMART data, you can post the results here and we
> can tell you what's going on.

compdoc,
thanks for your reply. Yes I'm very familiar with bad capacitors 
especially on the cheaper motherboards in the 90ties. However, this MB, 
an ASUS M4N78PRO, has visibly no defects and the fans are monitored so 
any defect will be signalled and the disks are healthy.
I think more it could be some interrupt conflict that is not solved. No 
error is seen in dmesg or any of the other logfiles (messages, etc.).
The mouse is an USB-mouse (Microsoft) and maybe a conflict in the 
interface is the cause but I have no idea. A bug report is not very 
useful as 12.04 is not developed any further so I assume my only hope is 
to wait for 14.04 TLS (as I only use Long term versions).
Hope somebody can come up with an idea.
Joep