Lots and lots of crashes with 5.9 in a Toshiba laptop [SOLVED]

[wcs]

Hello, all.

I've got a Toshiba Satellite 2450-101 (P4 2.66, 256M RAM, Nvidia 4 card).
This thing crashes all the time with 5.9 Standard and 5.9 Light.
Say, every half an hour or so, usually when browsing (but not only).

When it freezes nothing will bring it back, not Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, not Ctrl-Alt-F1, only a hard power off.

Now, I thought it would be the CPU or memory or so, but it *doesn't* crash with 5.9 Std RC3 (or with Windows).

Also, the crashes seem relatively systematic. Some webpages will make it freeze.
For example, this suse wiki page will make it freeze ALL the time (w/ firefox).
http://susewiki.org/index.php?title=Using_TightVNC

In 5.9 Standard it freezes just as kdm starts, so I cannot even login. Logging from the console makes it then freeze in other programs (k3b, for example).

Now, what could be the problem?
And what could have changed from 5.9 Std RC3 to 5.9 Std final that makes it happen? (same or different kernel?... need to check)

Thank you!

[lagagnon]

That is very strange indeed. As a computer tech I would almost bet that is a hardware fault, even though you say it never does it with other OS's. Have you at least run a Live CD and tried "memtest"? I would do that first. Then I would check your hard drive - for that you can use Ultimate Boot CD. Then using the same UBCD try a CPU burnin test, if all those three tests pass OK then consider it to be the OS and come back here...

[wcs]

For sure, that's a required step... I've just been lazy to do that. But I will.

There's another thing that makes me suspect the OS, and that's that in 5.9 Std, once I log in in the terminal, I was able to upgrade kdelibs and kdebase. No more freezing in kdm after that. But still lots of freezing using applications (especially kde ones).

Also, I used this laptop recently with Windows to do a series of psychological experiments. They were cpu intensive stuff, and especially video intensive as well. Not a single crash after doing this with 50 participants.
In Vl Light, it doesn't last 20 mins.

[uelsk8s]

there are reported problems with KDE and some nvidia drivers.
I would make a guess and say if you recompiled kdelibs with your nvidia driver installed it might fix the problem.

[wcs]

I guess it's solved now.
It seems that it was indeed the nvidia drivers.
Making sure I had the right version and fixing a problem where the driver had the vga out port as the default seems to have solved it.

At least, in these couple of minutes, there don't seem to be any crashes...

(Sorry, it looks like I had two threads for all these problems
http://forum.vectorlinux.com/index.php?topic=5412.0)