Lately my PC has started crashing while it plays videos. It freezes completely, screen frozen and not responding to any input (keyboard, mouse), I mean I cannot change TTY (alt + ctrl + F(1-2-…)), and it cannot even respond to alt + PrntScr + REISUB. I have to force power off by holding down the power button.
After I reboot I have tried checking all logs available and I cannot find anything logged right before the incident. Last entries are always different and not indicating anything.
I suspect it has to do with the graphics card but I’m looking for ways that I can dig deeper on that and confirm it or not.
What else should I check? How can I find more info?
OS: Lubuntu 22.04.3 LTS (latest updates) I’m using the nvidia proprietary drivers (nvidia-driver-390)
UPDATE:
First of all thank you all for your input and fresh ideas. Now I’ve already tried some of them and I will continue with the other ones until I get some results.
till now I have tried
- memtest and it didn’t show any errors.
- boot from a live distro and see if problem also occurs. Well it didn’t occur but on the live distro you cannot change the graphics driver. So it was using the open source nouveau driver, also it didn’t happen during the 1 hour I let it play. The thing is that it never was punctual even before. It could happen during the first hour or the third or sometime later.
Next steps are to
- open the case and clean it up to remove the possibility of high temp because of that,
- change my drivers to be the nouveau and try again,
- try with only the onboard GPU on,
- remove extra disks to reduce the load of the PSU
thank you all again.
Test your RAM. I had a machine doing this a few years ago - turns out I had a stick of RAM with a 128k block somewhere in the middle that was dead.
That machine worked fine as long as I didn’t get it doing anything too intensive, then it would crash. A new stick of RAM solved the issue.
This is the most likely issue. To add - test 3-4 passes of Memtest86+. The first pass is shorter and meant for finding egregious RAM problems. It can fail on subsequent full passes. I had my RAM fail on 3rd of 4th pass which passed the 1st. It could even be caused by incompatibility of the size of RAM with the platform. For example in my case AMD supported 2x 8GB sticks of this RAM with no issues. Insert 4x 8GB and it starts producing errors even if each individual stick passes with flying colors.
Seconded. I’d been having issues (random freezes, crashes) for a while but I had attributed then to a lack of RAM. So I bought some more RAM at some point and ran memtest on all RAM together and saw errors. Those bastards, they sold me dodgy RAM, right? Tested the new sticks individually, they were clean. Turns out I had a bad 64kb area on one of my old sticks.
You can tell the kernel to not use the bad area btw if it’s all in one place, so don’t necessarily rush out to replace the bad stick.
thanks. I run memtest for about an hour and no errors. I’ll leave it run more if nothing else shows any progress