Toshiba Satellite Freezing Problems

[Conor McDermottroe]

On Tue, 2004-03-30 at 15:18, Bob McDonald wrote:
> 1) When I play video (both MPlayer and xine) the display will sometimes get a
> seemingly random bright colored pattern on it and the machine will stop
> responding.  This seems to be more likely to happen as the machine has been
> used for a longer amount of time, and particularly if a video has been played
> before.  I'm not sure if it is related but with the same things increasing
> likelihood the player will sometimes put up a bright green screen with letter
> shadows on it and play only the sound.
> 
> 2) If I leave the machine on at night it will sometimes freeze up on a screen
> saver or blank screen, and the machine will not respond.
> 
> both of these problems require me to switch the power off an on again.
> 
> Anyone have any ideas?

On my Fujitsu A1010 (P.O.S. :-/) I had a similar problem to your problem
number 2. I found that anything that used significant amounts of RAM
would trigger the problem, so I watched top carefully and noticed that
it always happened when I ran out of RAM, before FreeBSD swapped
anything out. After banging my head on the wall for a while I had an
idea that it might be to do with the RAM shared by the video card. I set
MAXMEM to 192MB (I have 256MB) and the problem never happened again.

If you have the same problem it might also explain problem number 1.

Bear in mind that my fix for my problem is based on guesswork. I don't
have sufficient knowledge of either the problem or how the OS and video
card "share" RAM to accurately solve the problem. But, It Worked For
Me[tm].

HTH

-Conor