System Specs before starting:
Fedora 43
KDE Plasma
Wayland
i7-6700K
GeForce GTX 1660 super
32 GB memory (unsure if ddr3 or ddr4)

Hi! Recently I convinced my partner to make the switch to linux, specifically, Fedora. However, sometimes her computer will just completely freeze, and requires a hard reboot, I haven’t gotten the chance to test if reisub works while it’s frozen. Also, very, very rarely, it will come back to life, or show some signs of life; today, it froze, but I could still hear her over our call, and then it slowly advanced the display over the next couple minutes- as in the mouse was moving very slowly according to how she was moving her mouse when it froze- before stopping again and requiring a reboot.

I’m pretty sure this has been happening since day 1, fresh install, so I don’t think it’s anything we did/installed that broke things.

My gut tells me that it’s an issue with her memory, but it seems like the majority of the time, it happens while using graphically intensive apps/games, but that’s not always consistent. This leads me to think it’s actually an nvidia issue, we’ve tried both the neuveau and proprietary drivers, but it happens on both.

Does anyone have any ideas about this?

  • sudo@programming.dev
    3·
    15 hours ago

    Last time for me it was a bad CPU. Lived with it until I upgraded my CPU and recycled the old one into a new build. Then that one was having the same issue.

    • guynamedzero@piefed.zeromedia.vipOPEnglish
      1·
      14 hours ago

      Let’s say her CPU has been water cooled for a long, long time, without ever receiving maintenance, she’s had that computer for at least 7 years, and has never opened it once, and it was a hand-me-down from her dad, so I can’t say whether he took good care of it. Do you think that could have damaged it in some way?

      • sudo@programming.dev
        1·
        12 hours ago

        Idk about that. In my case I believe my CPU was defective from the start and I lived with it because I always assumed it was my OS in some way.

        If your CPU has seven years of not randomly freezing and its just doing that now then I wouldn’t suspect the CPU.

        However, unless you find some clues from journalctl -xeb1 or dmesg I would assume its faulty hardware somewhere.

      • Whostosay@sh.itjust.works
        1·
        13 hours ago

        Is it dusty as a mf in there? If so, yes. The fan very well could be stopped by dust and overheating the CPU or GPU which would cause a it to cut power and potentially freeze to attempt to stop damage to the component.

        I would at the very least open it and clean it, even if that isn’t the issue as it’s good to do regularly to increase longevity of the components. Make sure you don’t let the fans spin out of control while shooting air through them, it could damage them.

        Hope this helps.

        • sudo@programming.dev
          2·
          12 hours ago

          To build on this, it would help to install some sort of system monitoring to check temps, fanspeed, system usage and have those constantly going so OP can check for any red flags during a freeze.