Are there any "temp" or "trash" folders with deletable files

following words to the mbuttes incomp.os.linux.misc...:

Hmmm... Sounds peculiarly familiar... :-

Have you made any changes to your X server configuration or installed any (proprietary) video driver updates perhaps?

Overheating could be one cause, but considering the symptoms, you may be experiencing the same problem I am battling these days, i.e. a dying video adapter...

I also regularly have to reboot my system now - which is quite a tedious job as the POST alone takes up to 5 minutes on this machine without human intervention, and several minutes still with human intervention - in order to get my video adapter to work normally again.

For a while now, every once in a while - and these last few days it's more like several times a day - the screen either goes black, white, red, grey, green, blue, purple, yellow or whatever other solid color while I'm in the middle of working.

There's no warning, except for some funny lines flashing a few times. Luckily I have a root console open on one of my virtual desktops and I have shortcut keys set up so that I can switch to that root console immediately and then type...

reboot

... in the shell blindly.

Every once in a while after the reboot, the system will report 3 out of 7 CPU's found... My system has 2 physical CPU's, each with hyperthreading, so it has 4 logical CPU's. The motherboard and chipset don't even support 7 CPU's - or any other higher number than 4, for that matter...

A dying videocard can pull strange results on you, up to hanging your system by sending some incorrect voltage back to your chipset or something similar - I'm not an engineer or an electrician, so I'm only reporting what I've been told by someone who is. ;-)

The replacement card is already here, so it's only a matter of time before that's fixed. ;-)

The faulty videocard is a PCI-model Hercules 3D Prophet PowerVR 4000XT with Kyro chipset, by the way. It was never my choice, and ST MicroElectronics - the manufacturer of the chipset - refuses to support 2.6 kernels, so I can only use it via the framebuffer driver anyway.

Mine was 150 days, on two machines - one of which was a laptop! And then there was a power outage that lasted longer than the battery of my UPS could handle... ;-)

-- With kind regards,

*Aragorn* (Registered GNU-Linux user #223157)