System freezes

[newl]

I just installed Debian (Etch) with KDE, but after some time (2-3 minutes) the system freezes completely, only mouse moves. Firstly I thought it's a problem of a chipset temperature (I have nForce4 on MSI K8N Neo4 Series (MS-7125) motherboard, AMD Athlon 64, 2000 MHz (10 x 200) 3200+, NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT 128Mb, 512 Mb PC3200 DDR SDRAM - two of them), but cooler changed today doesn't help. What else can it be?

P.S. openSUSE 10.3 also freezes, so it seems to be a hardware/linux kernel problem.

[pavlo_7]

I just installed Debian (Etch) with KDE, but after some time (2-3 minutes) the system freezes completely, only mouse moves.
...
P.S. openSUSE 10.3 also freezes, so it seems to be a hardware/linux kernel problem.

It could be many things: failing hard drive, bad memory module, bad video card/driver, etc.
I would first check memory by running memtest, or removing one module at a time (512 MB should be enough to run Linux).

Edit: for video card check, try using nv driver (in /etc/X11/xorg.conf):

Section "Device"
        ...
        Driver          "nv"

[markharding557]

I just installed Debian (Etch) with KDE, but after some time (2-3 minutes) the system freezes completely, only mouse moves. Firstly I thought it's a problem of a chipset temperature (I have nForce4 on MSI K8N Neo4 Series (MS-7125) motherboard, AMD Athlon 64, 2000 MHz (10 x 200) 3200+, NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT 128Mb, 512 Mb PC3200 DDR SDRAM - two of them), but cooler changed today doesn't help. What else can it be?

P.S. openSUSE 10.3 also freezes, so it seems to be a hardware/linux kernel problem.

does it run ok on windows or a live cd also check cpu temp