[Techtalk] Hardware failure diagnosis

[mlynx at attbi.com]

Up until this weekend my laptop has functioned very well.  I was running 
kernels that were very stable.  Now the machine has started crashing, a lovely 
kernel oops.  Some of the earlier logs indicated a failed I/O attempt to the 
floppy drive, but the rest of the time, there is nothing in the logs to 
indicate something failing.  One person suggested a problem with XFree, but the 
system crashes even without XFree running.

Because of the errant nature of the failures, i.e. sometimes the machine will 
run for a couple hours, others for less than 30 minutes, I suspect a hardware 
failure.  I have already run Memtest86 and 10 passes failed to yield a single 
error (not to mention that 128 megs of the 196 megs of RAM is still under 
warranty).  My question is where do I go from here?  What steps can I take to 
track down the misbehaving hardware?  

mlynx