Computer Blues, part 3: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly [My Blog! My Blog!]

This morning, we took my computer back to Alpha Computer and had the nice folks there install a brand new power supply. (Cost: $50.)

The Good: KMail, which

esrblog had finished fixing right after we got the machine home on Wednesday, still works fine...

The Bad: ...when the machine is up and running. I *still* have periodic crashes, mostly (but not exclusively) when using Firefox, and they've begun to be accompanied by weird visual effects.

The Ugly: The last Firefox crash, which just happened a few minutes ago, bounced me to the Ubuntu log-in screen--which I could not use because my mouse had no control of the cursor. I was forced to turn the machine completely off and then turn the power back on to get mouse function back.

Now

esrblog is really stumped. He thinks there may be memory corruption at the heart of it, but this machine wasn't able to read his memory test CD the last time he tried to run it.

At least the machine isn't crashing as often as it did--it's only crashing about every hour or so while I'm using it.

March

Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
				1	2	3
4	5	6	7	8	9 1	10 1
11 1	12	13	14	15	16	17 1
18	19	20	21	22	23 1	24
25	26	27	28	29 1	30	31

Sun

Mon

Tue

Wed

Thu

Fri

Sat

Armed and Dangerous hasn't been reachable for a day or three. (404 error)

Edited Date: 2009-08-23 01:09 am (UTC)

[link] [reply]

Individual pages are up and reachable (ie: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1192); the front page is definitely stuffed. Given that Wordpress is functioning, I'd guess that his .htaccess file is munged.

[link] [parent] [reply]

esrblog is aware of the problem. It appears to be on ibiblio's (host) end; he's been talking to their administrators.

Wow, that is *really* weird.

Idea...have you tried it with a different keyboard and mouse?

ttyl

No; we'd need to pillage same from the house mail server to do that. The interesting things is that there was no mouse implication in my machine's problems before last night.

The only reason I suggest changing them is because if you use a keyboard or mouse with a PS2 style (aka mini-DIN) connector, due to an ancient memory addressing kludge, it has a connection to the memory address bus of the machine, known as the A20 line. Sometimes, in some weird and rare occasions, this can cause weirdness in a machine. So if your keyboard or mouse is hooked up via the PS2 port rather than being through USB port, you can glitch your memory.

ttyl

No. The mouse is definitely USB, and I believe the keyboard is also.

In any event, there has been no problem with the keyboard. I couldn't type in the log-in box because I couldn't move the mouse to select the space in the box, if you see what I mean. The keyboard has been fine throughout all of this.

I feel like Dr. Gregory House, here, doing differential diagnosis...

Accumulated symptoms:

* Won't boot off of a known good CD (Eric *has* tested that CD on another machine, right?)
* Running Firefox periodically crashes X and/or Linux and/or the mouse.
* Running KMail used to crash X and/or Linux.

Treated symptoms:

* Fixed possibly flakey power by replacing the power supply.

Suggested treatment:

15 minutes before bedtime, reboot the machine, login at a text console, and run "sudo apt-get install memtest86+". If your network connection is good, this will install a good memory tester that runs off of the boot menu (instead of booting Linux, you boot the memory tester).

Now reboot the machine again, and when you get the GRUB prompt, hit a key to go into the menu and choose the one that looks like "Ubuntu 9.04, memtest86+". That will start the memory tester.

Let the memory tester run over night, and check it in the morning. Have Eric look at the results in the morning...

Sure, that's what a responsible diagnostician would do. Me, I'm just going to pop a couple of Vicodin and recommend surgery...

If your machine has more than one stick of memory, start it up with only one stick at a time connected, see if you can isolate the problem to one of them then replace it.

If it's only got the one stick, swap it with one from Eric's machine.

If it crashes no matter what memory it's got in it, either your mains power is flaky, or you have an overheating problem. Try it on a bunch of different power outlets, then take the side panel off the case and stick a desk fan in. If it's a power problem, invest in a UPS, if it's cooling, have Alpha check it out.

Either that, or it's lupus...

We'd have to look to see what memory is in the machine; neither of us remembers whether there's more than one stick or not. Though that is an approach to try if Craig's suggestion turns up no new data; thanks.

The interesting thing is that vacuuming the innards of the machine and replacing the power supply has alleviated the problem *and* changed the symptoms somewhat, suggesting that there was multiple causation of symptoms going on.

I read your comment to

esrblog, and he agrees that's a great idea. We will try this... and probably generate another blog post. :-) Thanks.

esrblog didn't realize that memtest86 now comes with Ubuntu.

Cathy, a brand new machine is under $200, and that includes shipping. Here's the bottom rung core 2 duo system from pricewatch:

http://www.pricewatch.com/browse/computer_systems_no_os/core_2_duo_e2140

Currently that's bringing up a $189 system with Intel 3D video (Linux should use that just fine), 2 gigs ram, 250 gig hard drive, and a 1.6 ghz core 2 duo (2-way SMP 64-bit) processor.

Sure, by modern standards that system is a doorstop, but for web surfing and email it's a monster.

By the way, if you bump that system to 4 gigs of (faster) memory and a terabyte of disk space, it's still under $300.

For what I do, 4 gigs of memory and a terabyte of disk likely would last me the rest of my life--even if I live to be 100. :-) But I'll keep that in mind. Thanks.

Yes, I have no doubt that I could get a new machine for $189 plus shipping. I could also get a new motherboard for this one, if I wished, for $129 from Alpha (I checked their price list the last time we took the box there).

But I have enough repair bills that I'd rather not buy a new machine, or even a new motherboard, right now, if doing so won't fix my remaining problem--and there's no clear indication yet whether it would fix my problem. We ran memtest86+ for 18 hours and found no errors.

So what

esrblog is going to do is reinstall all my software. (I have two hard drives in the machine now so that shouldn't be that hard.) If *that* makes minx happy once more, no further expense is required. If it doesn't, I'll buy a new machine.

My Blog! My Blog!

Computer Blues, part 3: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

March