Mint Crashes At Random

[bitshifter]

Let me start out by saying that I'm a newbie to LInux and Mint. I had been running Ubuntu Edgy without any stability problems on an HP AMD Athlon box. I read about Mint and it looked good so I thought I'd give it a try.

After a couple false starts I was able to get Mint installed and it looked great except that some applications would lock the machine up. By locked up, I mean that CTRL-ALT-Backspace and CTRL-ALT-F1 did not respond. It was pull the plug time. I posted part of one of the crash logs on this forum and the suggestion was made that I remove Mono and whatever associated applications. I did that and things seemed to be running a bit smoother.

I've received a few updates that have been "pushed" and applied them. (The updates have originated from the orange colored icon that appears on my tool-bar.) Now my computer has taken to locking up many times a day. Most of the crashes don't even have a "crash" file associated with them.

The question: How do I diagnose problem?

Thank you for your help.

[frank392]

Hi
Could you be more specific, do you know the components of your computer ( Video Card, Wireless card, Etc.) and usually what are you doing or running in your computer when this happens?
Thank you very much

[psycosmyth]

there is a note on the download page as to how to correct the update bug, (reminds me of win)

if you want to avoid warning messages on upgrades add the following line to your /etc/apt/apt.conf (or create the file if inexistant): APT::Get::AllowUnauthenticated 1 ;

[bitshifter]

The computer has a 3000 AMD Athlon 2.16 GHz CPU
1 Gig RAM
120 Gig IDE HD
Built in hardwired network card
and an add-on NVidia video card
Mint is the only OS on this system

After reading about NVidia cards and drivers on this and other forums about Envy, I thought I'd give that a try. So far so good, I've been up now for 30 minutes without the system locking up.

[bitshifter]

I tried to do a little stress test by downloading something from the net and watching a video at the same time. Everything seemed to be working fine and then the system locked up. (I'm writting this message from a different computer.)

I like Mint and unless I'm doing something really dumb, it doesn't appear to be that stable. I could use some help with learning to diagnose issues with this OS.

Best regards!