[plug] [OT-ish?] Need help diagnosing unstable computer

[Cameron Patrick]

G'day all,

Apologies for what is probably an off-topic message, but I'm hoping that
some of the PLUG hardware experts can help me out here...

Last weekend I upgraded my home computer; while it was initially a pain
to get going I thought I'd ended up with a stable system as it hasn't
crashed all week ... *cue eerie music* ... until today, where it has
locked up hard four times in the last few hours.

I'm reasonably sure that this is a hardware issue - the machine didn't
respond to Ctrl-Alt-{Backspace,Delete} or SysRq-B, and the keyboard
lights weren't doing the kernel panic thing.  The crashes seem to be
occurring more-or-less randomly.  (I don't have The Other OS installed
to make a comparison w.r.t. stability so it may well be a software
issue.)

Anyway, I'm not sure where to start looking for potential problems; for
the record, the new components were:

- Nforce 2 motherboard (Asus A7N8X)
- Athlon XP 2600
- 2x 512mb DDR 2700 (passed Memtest86 on Monday, although I didn't leave the
  test on for very long, and this doesn't sound like a RAM issue)
- Radeon 9200
- 19" monitor (this shouldn't affect things but it means that I'm now
  running at a higher screen resolution and may be stressing things out
  more / tickling XFree bugs)

Ob-on-topic: Plus I'm using a new kernel version - 2.4.21 with preempt
and low-latency patches.  (Compiled with gcc 3.3.1 in Debian sid,
although there have been some posts on debian-devel lately which suggest
that this is not a good combination... on the other hand I've been using
the same kernel+gcc version on another machine for a few weeks and it
has been perfectly stable.)

Another random observation: has anyone else noticed that the DVI
connector with a DVI-VGA adapter has a poor picture quality at high
resolution (>1152x864) compared to the VGA connector on the same card?
I'm seeing a slight "flickering" or "wobbling" of vertical lines - I
don't think it's refresh rate related, and not really awful, but
noticeably when compared to the other monitor.  And worse, XFree seems
to insist on using the DVI output as the 'primary' (left-hand) head. :(

adv-THANKS-ance,

Cameron.