RedHat 9 System Lockup, Caps / Scroll Lock Flashing

[EtherCircuit]

Hi,

I'm new to linux, I'm dual booting RedHat 9 with Windows XP. When I'm in Linux my computer will sometimes freeze for no reason at all, and the Caps/Scroll lock lights on my keyboard flash.

This often happens when I'm just reading a webpage or doing something that I wouldn't think would cause the system to crash. All crashes I've ever seen before come from launching a program or actually doing something. This is happening for no apparent reason at all. Can anyone offer suggestions?

I'm running Gnome with kernel 2.4.20 on a 1.8 ghz P4 with 512 DDR Ram

I love linux when it works but I hate it when this happens!

-Jason
Linux newbie trying to get away from Microsoft

[yowwww]

did you disable plug n play in the bios?

[Dolda2000]

Flashing caps and scroll lock LEDs indicate a kernel panic, a serious error which really shouldn't happen. Except some user-caused stuff at system boot, they are extremely rare and almost always point to some kind of serious hardware failure, such a defective RAM modules or the like. Windows is sometimes more tolerant of these things.
Try your memory modules with the program at http://www.memtest86.com/. It takes a long time to run the entire test series, so you might want to leave it on overnight or so. If you have the time, run the tests several times.
You don't happen to live near a nuclear power plant or have radium concrete in your walls? Alpha and beta particles are known to corrupt memory.