Comment 25 for bug 993187

My system freezes every few hours.

I've used ctrl-alt-fn+F1 to switch to another terminal and open a sudo bash shell and then back to my 64 bit 12.04 LTS Ubuntu Desktop (Lenovo Thinkpad E520) to keep working as long as possible before having to do a hard reboot.

Freezes happen less frequently when (a) logged in with the Ubuntu 2D option and (b) fewer applications are running.

When the freeze happens, I can't generally toggle back to the open bash shell on F1 because the keyboard and cursor are not responsive.

However, a few times, the system has become sluggish before freezing, and I was able to toggle back to the shell and use "top" to look for obvious malefactors.

So far I have not observed any large spikes in cpu use or memory or other strange numbers before the freeze made the entire system unresponsive. (I should note that I'm inexperienced at investigating this type of problem.)

Without help, I don't know how to ssh into the system to observe the freeze in real time and, because I'm supposed to be working at my regular job, I lack the minutes needed to work out how to do it. If I can get some time this weekend, I will call someone to help me and try it out.

Would it be helpful to post the output from dmesg and /var/log/syslog even if collected *after* a hard reboot? If there is other information that would be helpful, I can try to gather it.