HW defect or system failure

[Matthew Seaman]

On 16/12/2016 10:54, J wrote:
> i got this weird problem of my notebook randomly rebooting.
> How would i find out if it is a kernel panic or a hardware failure?

What changed?  If the rebooting started spontaneously, and not in a way
obviously related to your upgrading the OS or packages, then it is
probably hardware.

Have you tried cleaning out and de-fluffing any air intakes or fans?  A
common cause of rebooting like this is due to overheating.  Making sure
the cooling airflow is unobstructed helps a lot.

You can try running diagnostic tools like memtest86 -- these will detect
many problems with RAM or CPU caches, which would confirm hardware as
the cause.  If memtest86 doesn't find anything, that doesn't mean your
hardware is definitely OK -- there are ways that hardware can fail that
memtest86 can't detect.

	Cheers,

	Matthew


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