Linux Mint Forums

I'm not sure if it was firefox or xfce itself since I have a browser open 90% of the time, but I had to total freezes yesterday, three actually. Hopefully it won't happen today, but I would like to know what caused it! Not seeing too much when searching for random freeze ups so I wanted to know if anyone else has had this issue. Fresh install, not many extra things added to the base install.

The mouse just totally freezes up and nothing on my keyboard works, so I have to hard reboot. I've tried a few different versions of Mint and I am really loving Xfce even though I have a fast computer! I would get the kde version again but I am all out of dvds and the kde version seems a good bit heavier than this version.

There are more posts when you search on 'crash.'

I have Mint 8 on a 6 year old Dell desktop and a 3 year old compaq laptop. The laptop works flawlessly. Love it. The desktop crashes randomly. I found that using a mouse and keyboard with the old fashioned round connectors (good thing I dont throw stuff away) instead of usb connections seemed to help a bit. Before the switch, a freeze-up would require that the button be pushed to turn off the computer. Since the switch, the REISUB while holding alt and SysRq buttons works to safely reboot.

I wish I had a real answer. It went for days without a problem at one point. Then I did the level 1 and 2 updates and it started crashing again. It's pretty frustrating. Hope you get some answers.

I have had this same issue, my machine would just freeze at random and only a hard reboot would get it going again. I think it is a kernel related issue. My only advice is to try another kernel and see if the problem goes away. Sorry I don't have a more solid answer.

The hard reboot is the worst part. Now that it safely reboots with REISUB, it seems to come back to where it froze without any losses, even in the middle of composing email.

Interestingly, we had a couple of hours of thunderstorms the night before last and I unplug everything but the refrigerator and lights when they happen. Since being plugged back in, the Dell has only crashed once and that was at the end of a ten hour day. Weird? I'm considering unplugging it every night, or maybe after every update.

I had a similar problem until a few days ago when I had the local power company service men out because I was noticing many switch-overs by my UPS. The problem turned out to be a failure of the ground of the transformer serving my house which they replaced.. I also have a ground in my computer room and it apparently was trying to ground the entire power system. Soil conductivity is poor here and line voltages were varying considerably from 80 volts to over 135 volts whenever some appliance in my house started. And I thought it was variations on the power distribution system. Now my line voltage is very constant and the random freezes have gone away.

I ran it for a month on my old laptop without any freezing problems.
It's a Presario 720 that has only 256MB of RAM and a 1GHz AMD cpu.
I also RAM it on my main pc with a P4 3.2 GHz CPU and 2 Gigs of RAM.
I have yet to have this problem.