Random freezes and Lock-Ups

[saywot]

I have just done a completely fresh installation of Fedora 9 on a Dell Latitude laptop, it was previously running Fedora 8 beautifully ( even better when I doubled the RAM - to the maximum allowed by the motherboard) Copied all the data from back-ups and got the wireless LAN up and running but
- and it's a big 'but'

I am now experiencing random lock-ups + freezes

Since it is on a variety of applications I can't really file a bug report but the freeze is complete and total I am unable to input anything from the keyboard or mouse it is frozen solid and all I can do is apply a firm index finger to the power button and do a hard re-boot

It may happen when using the Firefox browser, it may also happen when I open my eMail client and download mail. It could happen when I edit jpegs with the GIMP or try and peruse my MP3 collection.

Here's about the only things I can rule out

The RAM is OK
The HDD is OK
the rest of the gear (sound/graphics are integrated into the MoBo and typically they just fail not 'sort of fail')

I have done the terminal 'sudo update -y' thing and have all the latest versions of the kernel etc

But it will still just stop and do nothing until shut down quickly and radically

so any and all suggestions are more than welcome as I'd rather not have to go back to the older version of Fedora

[marko]

So you ran memtest86+ to prove the RAM is ok?

[saywot]

Yep, ran memtest to see if the Strontium (Hynix) cards are up-to-scratch

[saywot]

Originally Posted by saywot

Yep, ran memtest to see if the Strontium (Hynix) cards are up-to-scratch

Now have run it twice
the latest symptom seems to be
- when using the 'switch-desktops' function of compiz (that spinning cube thing) It wigs out followed by messages reporting that various applets have failed and need to be re-loaded (the workspaces bit of the Gnome Panel and other items related)

Fedora 8 had it's problems, mostly caused by me fiddling with things until they were broken but it was still more stable and reliable than this latest incarnation

[Anniedog]

Disable desktop effects. That freezes my desktop. Does ctrl+alt+backspace work to log you out of desktop?

EDIT
If you can get into the desktop long enough to open the terminal you could use
su -
password
&init 3
this will log you into the root shell out of the desktop completely
then
&cat /var/log/messages
should enable you to see any error messages that you can work on
&init 5
should put you back to the desktop runlevel.