I would like to call on your opinion and advice to help me resolve an issue that I have been stuck with for several months.
I have a tower that I had upgraded this year (CPU, Motherboard & RAM), and ever since, I keep having problems of stability with my systems. I first gave Fedora 27/28 a run, but I wiped it off after several months because it was just too unstable and buggy. I replaced it with a fresh install of Mageia 6, which fares a lot better bugg wise, but unfortunately it struggles too.
Here are the main symptoms:
- Graphical interface freezes
This is the biggest one. My desktop environment will just freeze at random and the system becomes totally unresponsive, I can't even switch to a command line session. So I'm forced to do a hard reboot each time. It tried with different environments (KDE, GNOME, Cinnamon, Xfce) but it makes no difference.
- Firefox crashes
For some reason, Firefox is quite unstable. On Fedora, it was just unusable, and even Chrome was bad. Here with Mageia, Firefox fares better but it will crash (either a Tab, or the whole Firefox) at random quite frequently. Usually, rebooting fixes it for a while but it happens again. Thunderbird, on the other hand, causes no problem at all.
- Unstable when two programs or more run simultaneously
This happened many times when I work with Libreoffice while listening to music (Audacious), or when I watch a video (SMPlayer or VLC) and I choose to run anything else. It can work fine for a while, then either i) one or all of the programs running will shut off, or ii) the whole system freezes and I have to hard reboot.
I don’t even run multimedia and Firefox together anymore because I know that something will crash very soon.
Considering that I have experienced the same problems with both Fedora and Mageia (but make it 10 times worse with Fedora), which on my other machines work flawlessly, I have come to the conclusion that my problem is related to faulty hardware or at least, bad communication between the kernel and the hardware. What do you think?
Also, is there a way I could find out for sure, before I send the computer to be diagnosed?
I need to mention that I updated the BIOS to its latest version and it changed nothing.
The only thing I haven't tried yet is test how a Windows install would fare on it, but I'd rather save that as the very last option.
Thank you very much!
Here are some specification of my tower:
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$ inxi -Fx
System: Kernel: 4.14.70-desktop-2.mga6 x86_64 (64 bit gcc: 5.5.0)
Desktop: Xfce 4.12.4 (Gtk 2.24.31) Distro: Mageia 6 mga6
Machine: Device: desktop Mobo: MSI model: H81M-P33 (MS-7817) v: 1.0
UEFI: American Megatrends v: V1.9 date: 03/30/2015
CPU: Quad core Intel Core i5-4690S (-MCP-) cache: 6144 KB
flags: (lm nx sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 ssse3 vmx) bmips: 25598
clock speeds: max: 3900 MHz 1: 3851 MHz 2: 3555 MHz 3: 3548 MHz
4: 3567 MHz
Graphics: Card: Intel Xeon E3-1200 v3/4th Gen Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller
bus-ID: 00:02.0
Display Server: Mageia X.org 119.5 drivers: v4l,intel
Resolution: 1440x900@59.89hz
GLX Renderer: Mesa DRI Intel Haswell Desktop
GLX Version: 3.0 Mesa 17.3.9 Direct Rendering: Yes
Audio: Card Intel 8 Series/C220 Series High Definition Audio Controller
driver: snd_hda_intel bus-ID: 00:1b.0
Sound: ALSA v: k4.14.70-desktop-2.mga6
Network: Card-1: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller
driver: r8169 v: 2.3LK-NAPI port: e000 bus-ID: 02:00.0
IF: enp2s0 state: up speed: 100 Mbps duplex: full
mac: 44:8a:5b:d8:ca:d8
Card-2: Realtek RTL8192CE PCIe Wireless Network Adapter
driver: rtl8192ce port: d000 bus-ID: 03:00.0
IF: wlp3s0 state: down mac: bc:ee:7b:e7:61:54
Drives: HDD Total Size: 500.1GB (37.4% used)
ID-1: /dev/sda model: WDC_WD5000AAKX size: 500.1GB
Partition: ID-1: / size: 50G used: 8.3G (18%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sda5
ID-2: /home size: 404G used: 163G (41%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sda7
ID-3: swap-1 size: 4.29GB used: 0.00GB (0%) fs: swap dev: /dev/sda6
RAID: No RAID devices: /proc/mdstat, md_mod kernel module present
Sensors: System Temperatures: cpu: 29.8C mobo: 27.8C
Fan Speeds (in rpm): cpu: N/A
Info: Processes: 188 Uptime: 6 min Memory: 566.3/15919.9MB
Init: systemd runlevel: 5 Gcc sys: N/A
Client: Shell (bash 4.3.481) inxi: 2.3.11