Frequent lockups :(

[Ernest Adrogué]

2016-03-28, 09:11 (-0400); brian escriu:
> Is there anybody else out there using Debian Jessie 64-bit and XFCE on
> an AMD PC who, for the 3 or 4 days, has been seeing frequent lockups
> of their PC? The crashes seem to occur when I'm using a browser, and
> using Iceweasel is worse than using Chromium. When it happens, that's
> it, everything locks solid, mouse cursor won't move, the keyboard
> doesn't appear to work, the display clock stops, the only thing I can
> do is to use the reboot switch. The only thing I notice is that the
> drive access light is still flickering (once every 5-10 seconds) and
> there's been a disk repair needed every time I've had to reboot. 
> 
> I know there was an amd64-microcode package in the last bunch of
> updates, it's for AMD processors other than mine (a Phenom II 6-core)
> so I uninstalled that, with no apparent effect on the problem. 
> 
> The 'about XFCE' dialog gives the version as "4.10, distributed by
> Debian". 
> 
> Anybody have any ideas, please? The lockups are happening every couple
> of hours or so. 

Look for clues in /var/log/dmesg.*

In the past I've had a few lockups like the ones you describe.  One was
casused by a catastrophic hard drive failure, and the other one was caused
by a buggy graphical driver that crashed the kernel.