Subject: CCL: computer (hardware?) problem

From: Ulrike Salzner <salzner|at|fen.bilkent.edu.tr>
Date: Tue, 05 Jul 2005 15:21:39 +0300

Dear all,
I have a very strange problem with a computer. It is a P4 2.8 GHz, 1GB
of RAM, 120 GB SATA HD, purchased in February 2004. For about 11 month
the machine was doing fine. Then jobs all of a sudden started to exit
randomly. At first I had Windows on it and used G98. Since I wanted to
upgrade anyways, I installed Fedora Core 3 and G03. The problem,
remained. Small jobs finish, bigger ones exit or remain in the queue,
collecting time and doing nothing. Since there is warranty and I suspect
it is a hardware problem, I contacted the company. They took the
computer kept it for 2 months!!! for testing but claim there is nothing
wrong. They exchanged the memory anyways. The problem persists.

 I reinstalled the system, the problem remains. Right now there is a job
stuck in link 103 for 3 1/2 hours. The CPU usage (top command) changes
between 0 and 99% but there seems to be no more progress. Is there any
trick to test what the machine is actually doing and to check what
causes the jobs to get kicked out? The same jobs run just fine on all my
other computers, which are installed and configured in exactly the same
way.

One thing I noticed is a message upon booting: "overclocking failure,
press F2 to load default values". I did this. Could this be a hint the
BIOS is configured wrong? Could the problem have to do with the power
management? I am at a loss.

Any hints would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Ulrike
-- 
Ulrike Salzner
Associate Professor
Department of Chemistry
Bilkent University
06800 Bilkent, Ankara
Turkey