Thinkstation E30 freeze

[rosch]

Hi all,

I have a relatively new Thinkstation E30 tower as my desktop machine. Unfortunately it completely freezes from once a day to once in two weeks..
I returned it to the store I bought it from and they checked it without finding anything wrong.

When the freeze happens there is no harddisk activity any more and the magic sysrq keys are not responsive.

I am mostly running Ubuntu 12.04 and I could find no clues in the logs.
BIOS is latest version: 9HKT53AUS (07/18/2012) as far as I can tell..the lenovo support site is not loading at the moment so I cannot check for an update.

Anybody out there who might know what this is?

[rosch]

Subquestion:
for how long should I leave memtest running, to see if the RAM memory is the culprit?

[ducky2802]

I had a really old lenovo desktop do something similar even after a completely new HD, reseat/replace on the ram, reseat CPU, fresh OS install... ended up being bad capacitors on the motherboard confirmed by inspection. I would check for driver conflicts and possibly pulling your graphics card (if you have one) and seeing if you have a problem. Could be GPU related. I would suggest installing a new HD and loading up a new OS and seeing if the problem is replicated. Might try re-arranging and re-seating your memory too. Could be a bad PSU. Apart from that, I highly doubt its the caps, but if any appear bulged, slanted with dried fluid, its possible.

[rosch]

I would check for driver conflicts and possibly pulling your graphics card (if you have one) and seeing if you have a problem. Could be GPU related.

The graphics are integrated: Intel HD Graphics 3000.

I would suggest installing a new HD and loading up a new OS and seeing if the problem is replicated. Might try re-arranging and re-seating your memory too.

There is a new HD where the OS is running from, but the original one is still present and used too.
Did memory reseating too, even took some out for a while but the crashes were not gone.

Could be a bad PSU. Apart from that, I highly doubt its the caps, but if any appear bulged, slanted with dried fluid, its possible.

What are caps?
EDIT: ok you mean capacitors (http://www.badcaps.net/pages.php?vid=4). Will check.