Diagnosing faulty hardware
Hello,
I've been running Debian stable for a few months without any major
issues. In the past week, Firefox (from backports.org) started closing
(seemingly) randomly. The entire computer has also hung once or twice,
and a couple of times, upon closing Firefox, X crashed. X has also
crashed a couple of times when Firefox was not running. Incidentally,
I have a Windows 2000 partition that has also started refusing to
boot.
Since all of these problems started occurring simultaneously, and
since multiple pieces of software (across separate partitions!) have
been playing up, I believe this is most likely a hardware problem.
Generally, the system is capable of staying up, although it has locked
completely once or twice.
The system specs:
AthlonXP 2400+
1 gigabyte of RAM
GeForce TI4200
The problem isn't always immediately apparent. I can have Firefox
browsing fine for a couple of hours before crashing, and then it will
continue crashing from there.
I currently suspect the problem may be one of the following:
(a) Faulty RAM modules.
(b) Heat related (I have yet to open the system up to see that all
fans are running).
(c) Faulty motherboard.
I initially thought that the problem may be the HDD failing, but I
would expect that to cause problems more with loading programs, rather
than running them.
Are there any diagnostic tools (preferably in the stable tree) that
can help me find the source of this problem, or does anyone have any
suggestions that might help me out?
Thanks very much for your time,
James Foster
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