10.1 Installation Freezing Laptop After 5 Minutes

I recently purchased a new HP pavillion 9000 series laptop and installed suse 10.1 on it. It came with Windows XP multimedia edition. I used a Suse LIVE CD to shrink my main NTFS partition by 20GBs to make space for SUSE 10.1. I created an extended partition and proceeded to install Linux on that. Dual boot works great, both operating systems booting. However a problem arrises after a few minutes of being in Suse 10.1

After booting into Suse 10.1, it runs great until about 5 minutes pass and the whole computer locks up. Only a hard reboot remedies the problem. upon reboot, no errors, works great until 5 minutes pass and it yet again will freeze up. If i do anything like update software it seems to cause the system freeze even quicker. I have reinstalled linux 3 times now with the same result. However, the computer runs perfectly and never freezes if i boot into Windows instead. I am new to linux so i do not know what my problem might be. A memory leak comes to mind however, thats just a guess. If anyone could please help me out, I would appreciate it.

Laptop hardware: AMD 1.6 turion 64x2, 1GB memory, 100GB HDD (60gb windows, 20gb SUSE 10.1, 12gb ASR), nividia go 6150. No updating/driver installing done yet. just a clean install

McMaster

Freezes occur sometimes in Linux. Most probable reasons are buggy drivers or buggy hardware. Windows may not freeze, since the software writers try to compensate for buggy hardware. Partially, Linux avoids hardware bugs when you pass safety (and performance-degrading) options to kernel during boot or installation. Most popular options are

noapic
nolapic
acpi=off

Some more are here:

http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Kernel_Pa..._for_ACPI/APIC

Or you can perform a safe mode installation. Or a minimal installation. These may help to localize the problem: exclude graphics, sound.

Although Windows does not freeze, it makes sense to check memory (RAM) with memtest. There was one case in this forum when a RAM malfunction was discovered, although the computer worked ok with Windows running.

A look at log files may help to see something. They are in /var/log: messages, warn, Xorg.0.log and others. Also say

dmesg

before freeze, to see whether the kernel reported something suspicious.

Update BIOS from the motherboard manufacturer's web site, if a newer version is available.

Try SUSE 10.0 or SUSE 10.2 Beta. Or try other Linuxes.

thanks a bunch. I'll give some of these ideas a shot and see how it goes.

I might add "heat"

Make sure the CPU fan is fully functional!

Check that cool'n'quite is on in BIOS and powernow is config'ed

Laptops are not made to run on your lap. I use an engineer's rule to prop up the back of my DTR Sager 3700+ to insure ample airflow thru the cpu fan as it runs hot when the cpu is 100%.

Get the latest BIOS.

Good luck...

ok so far i tried memory test and it came up with no errors. I proceed to install 10.0 and that still had the same problem. Ill try installing heat really quick. That could be the problem thought the fan has been coming on. well worth a shot. Next step is to start minimal and controlled installs.

ok so far i tried memory test and it came up with no errors. I proceed to install 10.0 and that still had the same problem. Ill try installing heat really quick. That could be the problem thought the fan has been coming on. well worth a shot. Next step is to start minimal and controlled installs.
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Very good and persistent approach. Are you not very young, or raised that way?

Ill try installing heat really quick. That could be the problem thought the fan has been coming on. well worth a shot.
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Er-Ah, I didn't mean install a program called "heat" -- I meant heat as in the CPU getting hot and the BIOS shutting the computer down. Most BIOSs have a section for you to select the applicable/critical Temps which should include "shutdown".

See if you can get cool'n'quite on in BIOS and powernow (AMD) or speedstep (Intel) configured.