unusual crashes

[halfjack]

Hey, guys. I'm running F14 on an Acer Aspire 7730, installed it about 5 days ago.
I've been encountering rather unusual crashes recently, they started about a day or two after installation.
The system slows down, and while I can still move the mouse, I can't click on anything or change windows or whatnot, and a few seconds later, I can't even do that, requiring a power off (because I was an idiot and forgot to enable the Magic Sysreq).
/var/log/messages reveals nothing but the usual iwlagn errors I've become so familiar with, though I can't shake the feeling that it may be something to do with the problem (mostly because it seems to occur when I'm using wifi, such as downloading updates, ssh, or browsing the net), but I doubt it does.
There doesn't seem to be any obvious cause, for example it's been fine for the last half hour or so, but I've had it crash within 5 minutes of a start-up. It doesn't appear to be anything I'm running, either.
Any thoughts?

[giulix]

A memory leak, maybe? Have you tried to monitor your memory usage?

[halfjack]

Other than running htop, no, but there doesn't appear to be anything untoward.

[halfjack]

Hrmmm. Just coming back in case anyone else notices this, and is having the same problem, although it's unlikely...
The crashes appear random, I am unable to reproduce them. Also, I note that while running htop to monitor everything, one processor jumps to 100% just before crashing.
Edit: Caused by a high kernel load.
I'll probably try rolling back or a re-install at some point, will report back if successful.

[CSchwangler]

You should still have older kernels installed on your system, so you could try one of these and see if it is really a kernel problem.

[joe.pelayo]

Hi halfjack

I notice you have an Acer laptop. Not to speak bad about Acer (I myself have Acer laptops as well) but have you considered the chance of a defective hard drive?

Back in June 2009 I got myself a new Acer laptop which was supposed (due to technical reasons) to outperform my former laptop, but guess what? Even with the same up-to-date Fedora the older one managed to beat the new one, and sometimes the new one would show the symptoms you described above.

After some troubleshooting the problem turned out to be a faulty hard drive (Hitachi), which as soon as I replaced ended the nightmare.

I don't mean to seem callous but my former Acer laptop had also originally a Hitachi hard drive which I needed to replace after installing Linux which noticed bad sectors on it (Windows wouldn't notice), so I am starting to suspect that either Acer bundles their value laptops with defective Hitachi hard drives (trusting that Windows will never notice), or those Hitachi drives can't handle transportation well (which would make me wonder how Hitachi is still in business).

Check if your drive is Hitachi, it might be worth a shot trying another one. You don't actually need to open the machine for that, just open the "Disk manager" or whatever palimsest is called and there you can check the "drive's technical name" which you can look after in Google.

Good luck,
Joe.