Screen freezes

[locutus]

For a week or two, my screen freezes: all motion, my mouse cursor, the video I'm watching or game I'm playing, everything stops dead for about five to 10 seconds. Except sound. So when I'm watching a video the screen freezes but I can still hear dialog. Then it unfreezes and the video has to catch up to where the sound had led in the video. Very annoying.

Anybody know what causes it and, more importantly, how to fix it? Short of a complete reinstall?

[MagnusB]

Have you made any changes with X recently? New driver, enabled compiz, edited xorg.conf? And what is your graphics card?

[locutus]

I have no separate graphics card. It's an MSI mobo K9N6GM-V, which has an integrated 256 Mb GeForce 6100 nForce 405 chipset.

I have not upgraded the driver or xorg.conf or anything. My system has been working so well that I was even thinking of not upgrading when the next version comes out. I'm *that* happy with it, and therefor not inclined to mess with it in any way. But the freezes are happening more and more often and in a 45 minute video I was watching this morning it must have frozen ten times. Compiz has been running, but always has; I didn't suddenly turn it on: it's always been on.

BTW: I should have mentioned I'm running the KDE version of Mint, in case that makes a difference.

[MagnusB]

Any updates? Firefox running? FF seems to have been a bit buggy lately.

[locutus]

There have been a couple of updates lately but I forget what they were. I have nothing in my sources.lst that shouldn't be there except the wine repository. The AWN repository is also there but is #'ed out and has been for quite a while.

FF I agree has been buggy lately but is not running when this happens.

[MagnusB]

It is hard to say what is going wrong, it might be related to the video drivers, might not. I would suggest taking a look at /var/log to see if any of the logs show anything of interest.

[locutus]

There's nine directories and gotta 50+ files there. Which should I be looking at?

[MagnusB]

messages, kern.log and the one concerning X which I don't remember the name, I would guess..

[locutus]

OK, those files are somewhat lengthy so I posted them here for you to view:
http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=f211 ... 99e2450cf6
I hope the link works, I've never tried this before. Let me know if it doesn't.

[MagnusB]

I didn't see anything out of the ordinary on any those, it might not contain the last lock though. I would suggest that you just look through them to get an idea of what is usual, then look at them shortly after a lock. If you have to reboot after the system locks, it gets easier to spot, just look for the last entries before last reboot.

[locutus]

Will do. So far I have not had to reboot. If I'm playing a game it rights itself after a few seconds of frozen screen, same with video: I miss 10 seconds of video (while audio keeps playing) then it's alright again after the pause.

[MagnusB]

It sounds like a software issue, maybe some video rendering thingy, I'm stomped, though....

[locutus]

Well, thanks for trying! I'll keep an eye on those files, plus I'm re-installing mplayer (and its offshoots) and java (the game thats been giving me trouble is written in java) and I'll see what happens. Thanks again