cant seem to get help

[scorn]

I have a satellite a70 laptop with Mint 14 KDE and I am having random cases where I get kicked back to the login screen or just a straight lockup I am a noob and cant find help. I really dont know where to look but here. I have 1 gig of ram and an ati rs300m radeon mobility 9100igp video card. I dont know if its related to that or not. I have been posting on this issue for a while and scouring the web but I cant find an answer. This os is not stable at all on my system Ive tried KDE, Mate, Cinnamon, and had basically the exact same issue on all three. What gives forum?

[bayvista]

Sounds like a memory problem to me. Next time you boot, run the Memory Test and see what you get. Also, do you have the latest version of BIOS for your hardware?

[scorn]

I will run Memtest. Bios is up to date. I wouldnt think this is a hardware issue being I have never had this issue in winblows. My ram is brand new corsair 1 gig but ill run the test anyway

[monkeyboy]

Well if you can't find an answer on the forum or on the net then it might be some exotic problem beyond the realms of experience of the users of those two sources. In your situation I would try another version of Linux that is not based on Debian (perhaps PCLinuxOS or CentOS) to see if the problem repeats itself. If it goes turtle again then you might consider a trip to a computer shop. Good Luck

[scorn]

I will try that and see. I really appreciate you replying your one of a very few.

[herbie643]

I had a similar problem right after an update. Seems that the update was to my video, Intel. After the update the system would all of a sudden just log me off. At first I thought it was fluke, but no, kept on doing it. Had to downgrade back to previous driver and all is well.
But the problem you are having seems to be awfully close to my older problem.
One thing to try is just do and Install, don't run any of the updates that are pending. I would think that if the system is fine then the problem is with the video driver.
Worth a shot don't you think?

[scorn]

I think I will try that because I have always done the updates first before anything else . dont you think though even if that helps I need most of those updates that it offers? I guess I could do them one at a time then and see what happens?

[homerscousin]

Hi scorn. If Windows works or worked fine then it isn't hardware, it's the software trying to make it run properly. I agree with herbie, I'd check the video driver first. Updates? Sometimes there are a boatload of them. If you had a need to install them to try and solve a problem, it might be easier and safer to install them by levels rather than 1 at a time. Level 1 is safest down to level 4 and 5, which should be hidden by default.

I just installed Mint 14 KDE 64bit, overwriting 13. I had some minor problems. I then did all the level 1-3 updates, all 337 of them. Problem solved. I was a little lucky. I ran version 13 and never did a single update because it ran fine as is.

[scorn]

Yeah Im gonna reinstall and just let it ride for a couple days with no updates then try them just one level at a time. If it goes fishy on me that will at least narrow it down. Thanks a lot for the posts you guys because I really need the help and am desperate to get off the windows leash

[djungk]

If Windows works or worked fine then it isn't hardware

I was having the exact same thing: freezes, kicked back to login, etc. I could boot from Windows, which was on a different physical hard drive and it would run for days with no problems. Back to Linux and 2 - 5 crashes per day.

it turned out to be a loose data ribbon cable on one of the IDE drives. Windows was on the other IDE drive and Mint on a Sata drive. I fought with the problem for a month, and it has now been three trouble-free weeks since I re-seated the cable.

Now that I think about it, Windows would never access another hard drive, but I had a file system on the "loose" IDE that mounted at startup in Linux.

Don

[scorn]

I actually am running linux only on this laptop. I ran memtest consecutively for 5 hours and didnt have a single error so at least I ruled that out. I go to sleep watching old twilight zone episodes everynight and everymorning when I wake up my laptop is locked up solid and I have to hard reboot. Vlc runs my laptop at about 85% cpu too and that seems really wierd considering its a 3.2 gig processor. I was under the impression that Linux was a far lower resource hog than winblows but Mint KDE is a total hog on my machine. That doesnt seem right.

[homerscousin]

Wow! I'm happy that you go to sleep watching old episodes of Twilight Zone. I do the same with my dvd collection of Hogan's Heroes. (Something whacky just happened, I was in the middle of this post, typing along, I must have pressed a key by accident, and completed an incomplete post, don't know, had to come back to edit. Hope it's just me and not the new install of kde 14 because I have seen a flippy with Gwenview, the system froze, had to reboot.) Don't remember where I was going with this now, other than try something other than VLC. Although VLC seems to work better for me in ver. 14- no more screen blanking. I,m sorry everyone, this was too strange. It may be my mouse. I have dropped it to a hardwood floor a few times and there may be a faulty solder joint developing. Time to shut down and examine it.