Hardware lockup - need suggestions for diagnosing

[Dan Miller]

Have you ran memtest86? Also have you tried a new hard drive? Windows
can "randomly" shutdown with a bad hard drive and bad ram. Usually I've
seen Linux panic and halt, but not always.

If neither one show problems it could be video, use one of the live-cds
and try just the console, if it can stay for hours from a cold boot,
then I would say its the video card, in which case a recycle is the
easiest and cheapest option.

Dan

Larry Cook wrote:
> I'm trying to diagnose my friends Dell Latitude C600 P3 @ 800MHz.  It
> just locks up w/o rhyme or reason.  Ctl-Alt-Del won't work when it locks
> up, so that, along with the fact that it happens with two version of
> Windows and four different Linux Live CDs makes me think it's a h/w
> problem.  It also seems to happen more quickly when cold.  (Isn't it
> usually the other way around?)  It hardly gets very far in the boot
> process when cold.  Once it's been on for a while I can get the OS
> booted and can do things, but it just locks up without any apparent
> relation to what I'm doing, or even when I'm not doing anything.
> Sometimes it just powers off.  I'm running on AC, no battery installed.
> 
> I've downloaded the Dell Latitude C600 diagnostics ran them for hours
> without a problem.  There are two RAM DIMMS, so I've tried with only one
> and then the other and in each of the slots.  So it doesn't seem like a
> RAM problem.  I've disabled Power Management in SETUP, I've tried w/ and
> w/o a mouse attached, and w/ and w/o the network connected.
> 
> Should it just be recycled or are there some ways I can diagnose the
> problem?  Any good diagnostic programs I can run?
> 
> Thanks,
> Larry
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