Pentium Freezes (Potato)

[Elizabeth Barham <soggytrousers@yahoo.com>]

Hi,

I recently purchased a pentium machine (HP Vectra VL Series 4 5/100,
32M). I installed debian upon it but noticed that the machine would
freeze up on occasion even in initial installation (badblocks read
test [rw worked fine]). Eventually I installed the whole system, but
when re-compiling the kernel, again, system-freeze.

So I compiled a kernel on another machine (2.4.17) and brought it over
but still, on occasion the machine freezes. This is very troubling
because the drives are out of sync and I am currently faced with some
inodes in lost+found left over from the last time it froze - while
installing rsh-server via dpkg. The nodes in lost+found are related to
dpkg and/or apt; dpkg no longer works due to a parse in
/var/lib/dpkg/avaialble.

It also freezes up during compiles - such as when compiling a kernel
or utils-linux.

My first notion of what might be wrong is the memory, so I pulled down
a copy of memtest but the memory checked out fine. Next I assumed that
the pentium chip itself was overheating and purchased a fan for the
CPU. But, again, it froze.

The machine itself uses the Intel PCIset chipset.

Any ideas? and thank you for any help.

Elizabeth