[ale] Memory or Software?

[Scott Castaline]

On 11/22/2009 01:24 PM, Greg Clifton wrote:
> As a hardware guy I suspect software. Generally if you have bad video
> ram, you see corruption on your display and if you have bad system ram
> you get system freezes or spontaneous reboots and probably kernel
> panics. I don't think you would have these sorts of problems from
> hardware, at least not the ram component of your hardware. Your mouse
> could be 'sick' and suffering a slow death. Do you have the latest video
> drivers? If so, maybe trying rolling back a rev., if not, go with the
> latest.
>
> Gigabyte makes good boards and as far as I know, Diamond makes quality
> video boards. If your system has been built a while you could try
> reseating your RAM and video card. Also, check for dust build up and
> slow fan speeds on your mobo, video card and CPU, but I would be
> surprised if that is our problem. I suspect software/drivers.
>
>
>
> On Sun, Nov 22, 2009 at 12:38 PM, Scott Castaline <skotchman at gmail.com
> <mailto:skotchman at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     Can anybody tell me whether I'm experiencing a software bug or if it's a
>     hardware issue?
>
>     I've noticed that certain functions over a period of time stop working
>     or become erratic. It became very noticeable with Songbird where
>     intermittently my "Last Played" Date/Time would be blank, even though
>     the track had played. If I restarted Songbird it would display correctly
>     for a while and then start again. It seems almost like a heat related
>     problem as it intensifies the longer the system is on. On first morning
>     boot, all is well, but later the problem comes to play.
>
>     I've had also for a while, but never thought too much about it until now
>     have lost my scroll wheel function when switching desktops. Not a big
>     issue, but when it happens I have to actually point to the desktop I
>     want and then click. Then of course, there was the issue that I asked
>     about a few months back that affected my display and someone pointed out
>     that I probably hadn't set the fonts settings correctly for my LCD
>     display. This problem periodically returns even though the settings are
>     correct, but if I open and close the dialogs the problem sometimes
>     stops.
>
>     I have a Gig-a-Byte MoBo (GA-MA790FX-DS5) with an AMD Athlon 64 x2, 4GB
>     RAM (OCZ 800MHz), 1ea Diamond PCIe x16 HD3650 Video w/1GB VRAM. I have
>     never seen memory usage reach 2GB or above, but, the problem seems to
>     happen when I have a large # files open in say OpenOffice or especially
>     Adobe Reader. I have also seen where if I have a OOo Calc sheet open to
>     max. window display and I am using the calc to verify a formula, when I
>     switch back to calc part of the calculator remains displayed on top of
>     my spreadsheet. Could this be a driver issue? Or could it be ATI chips?
>     Or maybe just bad VRAM or RAM?
>
>     Any opinions?
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I'm inclined to agree, as also a former hardware techie of legacy days. 
It seems to have started back in early Fedora 11 release. I suspect 
something to do with the newer X11 ways of working with ATI software. 
With F10 I wasn't losing functions the way I do now. I have already done 
the other things that you've mentioned. I make it a habit of once a 
month to thoroughly clean the fans and filters and dust on boards and 
HDDs. I also always reseat all boards and cable connectors. I just 
thought there was something that I missed.

I am going to take Paul's suggestion of running Memtest86+, are there 
anyother Open Sourced Diags available that would allow me to test 
various blocks of logic ie: IDE/SATA intfc, video bd, etc. Also anyone 
know where to determine what video driver and version is actually being 
used? Is it in /proc/modules? When i cat that file it shows radeon which 
I believe is the opensource ATI driver, but I thought that it's supposed 
to be radeonhd, or am I thinking of something else? I remember on F9 & 
F10 that I had to manually setup the configuration and set it to use 
radeonhd to eliminate other video related problems.

To me it's almost behaving like it's losing pointers as to where certain 
modules or code are located in memory, or maybe being overwritten. 
Events are actually happening but not being shown as such, if that's 
possible.