Opensuse Crashing

I’m not really sure what is going on, so don’t know if it is a software issue or not.

Basically, since I installed 11.1 it is crashing at least once a day, sometimes more. Basically everything just freezing, it doesn’t unfreeze, and I am having to turn the power off, then boo it back up.

It was happening with 4.1.3, so I moved up to 4.2, it happens there. It can happen when I open up firefox, or when i open up amarok. It’s also happened opening up ktorrent, kontact, and kopete.

How can I work out what is causing it?

Hard to tell - you could look in /var/log/messages from before you power-cycle or /var/log/Xorg.0.log.old (.old contains the log of the last X server run, not .old is the current run).

Most of the crashes of this sort that I have experienced have been caused by the graphics driver. You could change, either upgrade or try a different driver (fglrx <-> radeonhd, newer nvidia binary driver or Free ‘nv’ driver, etc).

Is desktop effects (Compiz/Kwin) enabled?

Try turning it off and see.