1 HDD/OS, switch between 2 PCs - Inconsistent behaviour

[Zynks]

My PC freezes a few times a day, to a point of being unusable for about 5-10 minutes each time. During those periods the HDD activity LED goes very busy, probably swapping memory, writing to the HDD (swapiness is set to 10).

Specs of my PC:

CPU~Quad core Intel Core2 Quad Q8300 (-MCP-) speed/max~2088/2499 MHz Kernel~4.13.0-39-generic x86_64 Up~7:08 Mem~2843.0/3944.9MB HDD~1000.2GB(38.7% used) Procs~238 Client~Shell inxi~2.2.35

I thought it was an issue with Mint, but last week I got a loan of a better system with 8GB RAM and an i5 processor. I removed my HDD and put it in the other PC and I tried doing some heavy duty video editing and lots of concurrent work and I never managed to get the system to freeze in a week of testing. Thus I am assuming this is a hardware issue (I shouldn't be getting huge freezes just with three Chrome tabs open and a few extensions running, Slack client and nothing else running on my hardware, or should I?)

I noticed that these problems occur the most when either Twitter or Google Maps is open.

So, I am hoping that I will find an answer here about what I could do to avoid these freezes. Thanks for any tips.

[JoeFootball]

Thanks for any tips.

I had a similar issue with a PC that froze up after 5-10 minutes, especially while under heavy usage.

Turns out it was a RAM module that had somehow gone bad. I discovered it by running MemTest from the boot menu on a Linux Mint live session.

I'm speculating that once the RAM module warmed up, it encountered some sort of hardware failure condition. I replaced it, and all was well after that.

Joe

[MrEen]

One user reported recently that upgrading his kernel to 4.13.0-45 resolved the CPU load issues he was facing, although I think he had been using 4.10.

On my previous computer (XP vintage) with similar RAM to yours, Google Maps often locked me up after several minutes.