System freezing frequently

[Chris Kurecka]

Hi,

I've been running Fedora since the project began (and Red Hat before
it), but all of a sudden for the past month or two, my system has been
freezing.  It seems to be more likely to happen if it has recently
happened, so if my PC is on for 6 hours without issue and then
freezes, it might freeze again 30 minutes later.  This is on Fedora 7,
and I don't think it happened in the test releases, but can't be
completely sure.

The main symptom is that everything becomes unresponsive.  Both the
mouse and keyboard fail to work (so I can't Ctrl-Alt-Backspace or
Ctrl-Alt-F1, etc.), and the mouse doesn't do anything.  Often (but I
don't think it happens every time), the Caps Lock and Scroll Lock
lights start blinking rapidly once the system is frozen.

I'm running an Athlon 64 X2 3800+ and GeForce 7300GS.  I'm using the
regular x86 version of the distro rather than the x86_64 build at the
moment, but I've gone back and forth between them over the years and
don't see why that should be the issue.  I first noticed this with the
"nvidia" video driver and compiz, so I disabled compiz.  The freezing
persisted, so I then further switched to the main "nv" driver.  The
freezing is continuing to occur.

I found an obscure bug mentioned online that some people have with
AMD's Cool & Quiet (or something like that) for power management, so I
tried disabling that in the BIOS, but that also did not fix things.

For what it's worth, the issue also happens in Ubuntu 07.04 on a
different partition, though I use that much more rarely.  I have the
GNOME System Monitor applet in my panel, and it looks like CPU0 goes
to near 100% when the system is frozen, and CPU1 is maybe 20-50%.  The
hard disk light also seems to be blinking rapidly.

My inclination is to think that it's something related to the kernel,
since it seems to have to do with the CPU spiking, but I have no idea.
 I've gotten my PC to freeze when using Firefox, Evolution, Pidgin, or
just Nautilus.  It doesn't seem to matter what I'm doing at the time.
I don't think it's a hardware issue, but I can't be sure.

I would greatly appreciate any help or suggestions.  I'm not sure why
this has started all of a sudden.

Thanks,

Chris Kurecka