Debian crashing

[Paul Bryan]

> memtest on a bootable floppy is an easy to run first check. Does
> your mobo monitor CPU temperature?
>
> Antti
>
> ---

When I used to work as a computer tech, we found the only really reliable way 
to test components was swapping them out with known good parts and seeing how 
things went. Admittedly, we had access to plenty of spares which you may not, 
but if you have parts around, try them out.

Memory tests, diagnostics and the like are useful tools, but unreliable. We 
found some bios' would cause memtest (and other memory tests) to report 
errors when there were none, some tests would report ok status when the 
memory was definately faulty and so on.

I would suggest trying bit by bit replacement. Seeing as it's fairly 
intermittent you may also want to put the suspect part into a known good 
machine (preferrably not doing anything important!) and monitoring that box 
as well. 

Then again, as someone pointed out, if it's an old box it may not be worth 
the time.

Running memory intensive programs is a pretty good way to test memory. A tech 
I used to work with swore by installing M$ windows. He reckoned that if there 
was the slightest problem with your hardware, windows would find it ;) It 
worked pretty well actually. I tried it a few times on slightly suspect 
machines and hey presto - crashes. Bit slow and cumbersome though...

Cheers,
Paul.