openSUSE 11.2 freezing up

[blktip33]

I recently installed openSUSE 11.2 on my laptop and it has been randomly freezing on me. It will be working for a bit and then all of a sudden it freezes, the mouse pointer moves around but I cannot click anything and the keyboard does not work. I have to push the power button to manually restart the computer. I had installed Ubuntu 9.10 before trying out openSUSE and it had the same problem too. I have been searching the internet for a fix for the past few days but I havent been able to find anything substantial except that the problem is most likely my video card which is an integrated Intel 855GM. Ive noticed that alot of people with the integrated Intel video cards have been having problems like this. I am a beginner at Linux but I was wondering if anyone else has had this problem or knows of a fix?

My computers specs are:
Intel Celeron 2.5GHz
512MB RAM
40GB HDD
and the Intel integrated video card 855GM

Any help would be great. Thanks.

[scathefire]

have you been using the same desktop environment? if so, then it might be isolated to that particular environment, not necessarily OS dependent.

[blktip33]

I used GNOME with Ubuntu and then Xcfe4 with openSUSE. Then I reinstalled openSUSE with GNOME. It happened in all 3 cases.

[gogalthorp]

What brand is it I want to be sure not to accidentally buy one. LOL

Random lockups are hard to diagnose

Maybe try changing the video driver, but Intel drivers are fairly good in most cases.

To try at the boot type 3 to enter the terminal mode.

log in as root

type

sax2 -r -m 0=vesa (note that is a zero not a capital o)

reboot -n

run like that for a while if it helps you can try moving back to the intel driver. It may just require a xorg.conf file to do so do the above and replace vesa with intel