KrisWillis.com

Ever since the upgrade from 7.04 to 7.10 I have been experiencing random crashes. The type of crash varied from full-on lock-up where the only way out was to hit the reset button to mild crashes that could be escaped by restarting X (Ctrl-Alt-Backspace). Sometimes the system would just hang for 30 seconds then come back to life.

As you could imagine this was becoming rather irritating, it being my main dev-box and all! I started monitoring my system from another machine on my desk over SSH by running top. It would appear that whenever my machine ‘crashed’ Xorg would be the culprit, consuming 100% of my processors cycles.

It turns out that many people were experiencing this problem over at the Ubuntu forums and there seemed to be a trend developing where a large proportion of us were using 64-bit AMD X2 chips and the Nvidia GeForce 7 series cards, namely the 7300. My fix involved downgrading my video drivers from the proprietary 100.14.19 to the 100.14.09 release, obtainable from the Nvidia website. This fix didn’t work for everyone in the thread at UbuntuForums, but did for some.