Sometimes my computer locks up completely, so that neither the mouse nor
the keyboard will work. I'm running SuSE 7.2 on an Athlon 1.2GHz/Shuttle
Spacewalker AK12A, 256M memory.
It seems to happen when I'm in a chat room. Running Mozilla 0.9.9 with
recent Java plugin, also running Yahoo Instant Messenger, and it seems
like things were loading very slowly in the chatroom all the times this
had happened. I'm on a dialup line, so when I say slow, I mean like
go-and-make-tea slow. Otherwise, the connection is ok (46.6K) when
loading other pages.
ctrl-alt-backspace does nothing, alt-F2,3 etc. does nothing, same for
ctrl-D, ctrl-C, ctrl-Z, ctrl-alt-Fx. I had to hit the kill switch. This
last time, it wasn't too bad, but the time before this, rebooting to
linux was pretty scary. This only happens once every couple of weeks.
I'm suspicious of the keyboard, because it persisted once when I
rebooted to win98, then it cleared when I rebooted once more, first
wiggling the wire where it goes into the keyboard.
Does it sound at all like a software problem, or should I just ignore it
and replace the keyboard? And is there some other way to bail out that I
haven't tried?
Thanks,
Greg
