[Techtalk] Determining Hardware Or Software Problem

[Wendy Mores]

On 10/15/05, Kylie Willison <kmw at bridgeonline.com.au> wrote:
>
> <snip>
> Fresh Ubuntu (hoary) install worked fine for about 3 or 4
> months on a secondhand computer. Now according to the owner
> it's freezing after login then reboots. Even turned itself
> on in the middle of the night once. Yet I've been able to
> boot and login fine. So far I've only tried it once.
>


I've seen this kind of thing happen quite a few times in the past and most
of the time that it was due to overheating. I would suggest checking the
fans on the power supply and processor to see if they are functioning
correctly and then check for overheating of the cards. Once I had a computer
that would lock up all the time about 30 seconds after boot and then it
would restart itself. All the hardware was ok and it turned out to be an
overheated video card that was sandwiched between too closely to a pci
network card. Dodgy memory can cause freezes too, but freeze and reboot is
often heat related.

That's not to say that it couldn't be software, but if all configuration is
the same and it worked before, I would start by looking at the hardware.

Wendy