Michael Hannon wrote:
> Greetings.  One of the profs here has a dual-processor (Intel Pentium D 
> CPU 3.20GHz) Dell workstation.  The prof was complaining about browser 
> instability when he  was using SL 4.1.  I didn't see any problems when I 
> used his system for browsing, but I figured that it couldn't hurt to 
> upgrade to SL 4.4.  We proceeded to do the upgrade "in place", according 
> to the "For those a little more cautious" recipe at:
> 
We have an automated test rig in the lab, where we can network boot 
machines which have been reported as troublesome. We can then run 
memtest and stress tests on them for a long period.


I would advise running memtest on this machine for a day or so, then 
some CPU heating stress tests.
Download Stresslinux  http://www.stresslinux.org
Burn a CD and boot the machine from that, or if you have a PXE setup use 
the PXE bootable version.
Boot into memtest first, and let it run for at least 24 hours.
Then boot up and run cpuburn

My gut feeling is a saggy powersupply. Either faulty or underspecced for 
two processors plus lots of RAM.
I assume from what you say that in the syslogs there is nothing - the 
system just halts for no reason?