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On Tue, 2010-03-16 at 11:10 +0000, tom wrote: > I'll have a look at cpuburn - what baffles me though is I'm using that > particular PC all the time and no-other programs have any noticeable > faults which would be expected at the same time (other than > firefox/flash issues) I have no special GPU or anything so F@H is just > hammering the cpu/ram and the odd bit of disk - as would any other app. > Nothing crops up in the logs anywhere. I'm probably just looking at an > excuse to get an one of those 4 core AMD's but the only thing that fails > is f@h and until I can get something else to fall over I cant even > convince myself its a valid expense! > Tom te tom te tom Hi all, I've decided that this is as good a moment as any to de-lurk after a few months of reading the list! Tom, your day to day usage won't be putting your hardware to use anywhere near as fully as F@H, unless you're doing something like video rendering/encoding. I've also found linux systems to be incredibly resilient to hardware errors; most recently I had a dual boot system pulling a regular BSOD on windows due to bad RAM, on Ubuntu the only indication I had was the occasional crash and restart of Firefox and the odd bad MD5 checksum. If your memory checked out fine with memtest I'd say the next thing to have a look at is the PSU. Bad power can cause all sorts of unexpected problems, most of them inconsistent and hard to reproduce. It can also damage your system badly if left unchecked. I'd check voltages in the BIOS, OS and with a multimeter before running any stress testing. If it is dirty power you don't want to compound the problem and fry your hardware. Stress testing tools like cpuburn are probably the closest you will get to the kind of work F@H does - Prime95 is one I use regularly. Just make sure you have effective cooling, I wouldn't run one on a system with unchecked old thermal paste for example! Best wishes, Dan -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html