freezing parsix

[lawmanuk]

i've sort of got used to my iceweasel just disappearing on me without warning, losing my work (its not a gnash issue, as i've removed that) - but yesterday, my parsix system just froze completely twice, without any reason or warning.

starting to get windows blue screen fears now. not sure if it's lenny related, as i've seen it happen a few times before on lenny suddenly, but not very often.

sigh.

[cmost]

Based on my brief study of your hardware, I'd have to say that your laptop is not quite Linux capable. Yet. Please don't give up on Linux based on this experience. Many laptops contain highly proprietary, non-standard hardware that gives any operating system besides Windows a headache. When you consider that hardware venders get customized drivers from Microsoft while the open source community has to practically reverse engineer everything themselves, I'd say the Linux community has done a pretty good job so far. Unfortunately, support is not complete for every piece of hardware, as you've discovered.

[lawmanuk]

okay... the only strange thing is that i've never had the same problems with ubuntu, pclos, dsl, puppy etc.

oh well.

[xet7]

Please make sure you have everything backed up, so that you don't lose anything if any harddisk fail. I had same kind of problems because I had failing external harddrive. When freeze happens, mouse doesn't move, and nothing else can be done, computer need a power off.

I have external 500 GB harddrive, Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 with firmware 3.AAK. It's connected with eSATA, and haven't worked for some days, so I bought this USB cable that connects to any IDE&SATA harddrive without any cases:
http://www.polarpanda.com/store/product ... ts_id=1006
I had this external case and drivers:
http://lauri.ojansivu.googlepages.com/p ... 132Working

When I connected power cable to eSATA interface, smoke came from the connection. I quicky took wires off, so that nothing in my wooden shelf is damaged. I tested again at the floor, and again smoke came from the connection. I have lots of jpegs and videos on that harddrive, and no backups of them anywhere, so it's going to harddrive recovery service in near future, and then to Seagete for replacement because of 5 year warranty it has.

My laptop's internal 2.5" harddrive still works great. I did run it with Spinrite option level 4, so it recovers any damaged data, and let it cool down for one night.
http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm

My laptop has since worked without any freezes for days. Connected to it is my USB Creative Live! Cam Optia webcam, USB keyboard and mouse, external monitor, USB lamp, and everything is working great.

I have ordered 64 GB SSD IDE 2.5" harddrive, because I'm loosing trust to magnetic harddrives, that are spinning at so high speed with small distances and very easy to damage. Using SSD Flash harddrive improves battery life, speeds up computer a lot, no need to defrag because access to data is instant regardless of data position, it's very quiet - no noise from harddrive spinning, and much more resistant to dropping laptop or moving laptop while it's on. Spinrite should not be used on Flash drives.

There will be bigger SSD harddrives coming to market in the future at least from:
- Intel: 80 GB and 160 GB
- Samsung: 250 GB

Another thing is power. I have bought power adapters between wall and computer so that is stabilizes any power variation, and has warranty so that if devices behind it get damaged, it gives money for equivalent replacements. Here's some thunder sometimes, and although in city main power cables are underground so devices haven't been damaged, there can be variations in power stability, that will also shorten device lifetime. I do not have any other batteries than what's inside my laptop, because only some minutes of other external battery power is not worth the price for me.

[lawmanuk]

its strange. i have noticed, that sometimes, when i connect/disconnect the power cable to the laptop, the freeze happens... more on lenny than parsix.

[xet7]

lawmanuk:
Strange. I tested with my laptop by connect/disconnect power cable, and no freezes here. I have only had freezes because of failing external harddrive on 2 days lately. I don't remember when before I had freezes and why, because it's so long time it happened before.

You may try removing any external USB etc devices, if some of them have problems, and try again connect/disconnect power cable.