Losing Control of My X40

[dehory]

When I push my old, old X40 too hard, it stops listening to me.

Loading a few tabs in Firefox is no problem. But when I open a few more tabs and run Thunderbird and WinSCP as well, it stops responding to the keyboard or trackpoint.

Bizarrely, holding down the power button (which should force a shutdown) doesn't have any effect either. And even more bizarrely, the computer is actually still running. The hard drive and wi-fi lights flicker at me mockingly. I can even see a cursor blinking on the screen as if nothing was wrong.

I recently encountered an issue with the USB ports (which is to say they stopped working) that I supposed was a motherboard problem. I worked around this by using a PCMCIA USB/Firewire card but haven't gotten around to replacing the motherboard yet.

Is it probable that this new problem is also motherboard related?

For the record, the X40 is a standard issue 2382HCU with a 1GB RAM upgrade.