Debian ADM64 Etch (testing/unstable) system freeze

[Rami Saarinen <rami.saarinen@uta.fi>]

Hello all, 

I recently upgraded my computer to AMD64 bit system and happily installed the 
testing/unstable Debian on it (updated last time few days ago). All has been 
pretty ok, but I seem to get these full system freezes every now and then. 

The system is:

AMD 3200+ Newcastle
Asus A8V motherboard
1024 Mb Corsair memory
Samsung P120 200 GB hard disk
LG 4167 CD/DVD RW drive
ASUS V9570TD 256 Mb GForce 5700 video card

Now, the video card is piece of junk crashing to the desktop on NWN and other 
3D games quite often. I have tried latest two nvidia drivers. Not the 7676  
version that is supposed to be pretty stable (but unfortunately installs the 
libraries to wrong location and I have had no time to start fiddling around 
with it). 

What happens is that apparently without any proper reason the system just 
freezes. It may be that there is no much activity going on when this happens 
and logs seem to be totally unaware of such thing happening. I am most of the 
time running X and kde 3.4. 

Anyway, today I made a (QT) program to transfer some ogg vorbis files to wav 
(oggdec) and to mp2 (toolame) and move the resulting files to some other 
location (which happened to be USB memory). And this really seems to upset 
the system as it did freeze twice in a row when trying this out. I could be a 
mixture of processor load and disk / usb traffic that causes it. 

The program is bugless, of course. ;)

I myself might bet on the video card, memory (ran memtest86+ on it few times 
no obvious holes in there) or the disk. I have tried to tune down the memory 
and disk settings but that does not seem to help. Does anyone have an idea of 
how should I proceed with this and what do you think what is causing these 
freezes? I am not a hardware specialist nor I still do not know the secrets 
of Linux kernel altough I have been using Linux since 2000 or so.

I have a feeling that the freezes were more common with the earlier nvidia 
driver... But I cannot be sure. 

Thanks for help and pointers.

--
Rami Saarinen