fresh install, randomly freezes

[adanrott]

Brand new hard drive, installed mint from the usb version about an hour ago, now when i get on the internet, it will randomly freeze up and i have to power down. or, like just now, i inserted a thumbdrive and the screen went black a minute later. had to power down again. any ideas on the cause of this?

now i just discovered that anytime i try to click and drag anything, any windows that were open and any icons on the desktop dissapear. my taskbar is still there, i can open terminal, but dont know how to use it. i can open firefox, but not my computer or documents.

[beefstu]

Some more info would be useful. Please follow http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=33561.

Also what exactly happens when it 'freezes'? you say you can open a terminal so you can presumably get into the menu then? Is it just the open program that freezes? In which case you can run

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killall <ProgramName>

where you change <ProgramName> with Firefox for example.

Also, when you get the freeze can you type this into the terminal

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dmesg > dmesg

and next time you get control of the computer goto your home folder and you should have a file called dmesg, can you post that here? You could also try

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sudo reboot

to restart the computer instead of risking your harddrives by pressing and holding the power button.

It sound like it could be a graphics problem, as well as what the link I posted suggests, can you post the output of

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inxi -G

[adanrott]

for a little more information, i am on a HP envy15, linux mint 8 helena. not sure what else you need, cpu is a intel Q720 @ 1.6 ghz

inxi -G returned this

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Graphics: Card ATI Moility Radeon HD 4830 [M97] X.Org 1.6.4 Res:
1920x1080@59.9hz
                           GLX renderer Software Rasterizer GLX Version 2.1 Mesa 7.6

also, sometimes its just the program that freezes/dissapears, but a few times the computer has restarted on its own. just a few minutes ago, i was on this forum clicked a link and the computer restarted. no other programs open, just firefox. and othertimes ill go to click on menu after it freezes and the taskbar will dissapear too. and i have to hold the power button to shut it down since i can't do anything else.

also, i dont have any mouse click functions besides tapping the pad (so only left click) for some reason it doesnt reconize the fact that my mousepad has the buttons built into it and acts like the whole thing it one large mousepad.

just froze again, but it wouldn't let me access the menu, i tried ctrl-alt-f1, which i think is the equiv. of ctrl-alt-del...didn't work either, had to hold the button. if i keep having to hold the button to shut it down, will it harm the harddrive again? the thing is brand new (bought yesterday) so I'd really rather not F it this soon.