FC4 System Freeze

[mongenix]

Hope this is the right place to post this, so here goes.

I have a business I do work for and they were using dumb (wyse60) terminals to access an Unix box to run proprietary software. They wanted to replace these terminals with desktop computers...(Windows of course). Even though I am new to linux, I have years of experience with UNIX and suggested they look at LINUX. I installed FC4 on a Sony Laptop and setup gnome-terminal to telnet to the Unix box (had to rewrite the termcap to get things to work correctly in vt102 mode) and they loved it. Little to no virus, spyware and other issues were attractive to them. I now have 10 linux FC4 system installed and running, at least 99.9% of the time. Now that the background is set, here is my problem.

So far 3 of these system experience intermittent freezes. The systems simply hang. No response from the keyboard, including the numlock light or the mouse and I cannot ping the systems from the network. The video is displaying what the user was working on but no response. This problem may happen after several days, or several hours. It may happen after the system is idle for an hour or a few minutes. I have now disabled the xscreensaver to see if this is causing the problem but it has only been half a day since I disabled this and do not know it this helped.
Any one else experiencing systems hanging or freezing?

The systems have Intel motherboards(D101GGC), ATI X300 PCI-E video, 512MB DDR, Intel 3.0Ghz HT processor with HT turned off because of a wireless card problem in the (smp) kernel (at least I can not get it to work). The wireless is a linksys card with an rt2500 chip using drivers from serialmonkey.com.

If these systems are stable, this is 10 more systems that are NOT WINDOWS!
I have 4 more desktops to install and I need to replace the Main server. Hopefully with Linux. But due to the problems with the proprietary software a hanging or freezing system could created, I can not convert any more systems to linux and if the problem continues, I will have to go to windows for stability(NOT!). That would ruin my day.
I have not looked at all of the ogs because I am not sure where to look.. But I am searching and have not found anything that clues me in to what the problem is.

[jsowoc]

I sometimes get the same problem. I am using FC4-32, and update regularily.
My hardware runs on a P4-3.0E (probably same as yours), but with SMP turned on. Gigabyte motherboard, 1GB memory, SATA HDD, Matrox P650 video card.

I first noticed it after I updated the kernel, and it was suprisingly stable before then, but it might just be coincidence. When you said three systems freeze, did you mean that the same three (of the ten) freeze on a regular basis).

Fedora Core 5 is out (you need to look around to find a mirror that has released it already), so you can try that. If you want to stick with FC4, I'd suggest trying to go back to the original kernel.

[mongenix]

Yes, the same three systems freeze but I feel it is only a matter of time before the others follow.
The systems have only been installed for a week and one system has hung 3 times, one system hung twice and another hung once. All had the same symptoms.... no response at all. Only the system on light was lit on the front of the system. No HDD access light or any other indication of system activity. Company policy states that the systems are to be shut down each night and restarted in the morning so the systems are not running for several 24 hour days before they hang. One system hung after only about 2 hours of up time.

[Lluisanunez]

I'd look at the system logs at /var/log/messages at the point where it crashed
Maybe the last message shows an error, or some info you can post here to get help