[plug] hot freeze - not a contradiction in terms

[Ian Kent]

On Tue, 2006-12-12 at 20:34 +0900, Gavin Chester wrote:
> With this hot spell I have seen my workstation emulating a windoze PC in
> the sense that twice today without warning it has lost all keyboard
> input and apparent disc I/O so that I could not even open a VT or do
> anything except a full reboot.  
> 
> I suspect the heat is causing disc problems and perhaps my box is not
> ventilated well enough, but I can't find anything in /var/log/messages
> at the time the latest lock-up happened.  (Aside: you may recall that I
> reported problems with these discs before in that the filesystem has
> become read-only without warning)
> 
> Just what might I be seeing here, do you think?  Where might I look to
> get a better understanding?

Or it could be capacitor(s) starting to dye.
You'll know about that because after a while (hours, days or months) the
machine will become unusable and eventually will fail the POST and won't
boot at all. I've found the most common time for this to happen is
summer time, probably because of the increased operating temperature.

Faulty caps are easily spotted (a bulging or a browny colour on the top
of the cap can) and apparently easy enough to replace but I have yet to
repair a motherboard myself.

Ian