Previously I was running SuSE 7.3 Pro on a Gateway computer. Pentium II 350, 256 meg ram, ide drive, STB Velocity graphics card (riva 128zx chipset). also had VMWare 3.0 running Windows NT 4.0 and accessing a Novell server. system was very stable, no problems. Decided to upgrade as another user in the office needed an upgraded machine so I gave them mine. New system is the following: ECS K7SEM motherboard, Athlon 1.4 GZ CPU 512M PC 133 SDRAM Adaptec 29160 SCSI Controller IBM 10K 18 G hard drive (DDYS or something, I forget) Jaton TNT2 AGP 32M video card Seagate 22000A tape drive Legato CD-RW noname dvd-rom This is used for business, so no fancy graphics are needed. I am using KDE 2.2.2, but kept QT at 2.2.x. i am using the nv video driver that comes with SuSE7.3, with 3d accleration not enabled. I previously tried the nvidia drivers, but had lockups with those as well. using XFree86 4.2. currently using 2.4.10. Have used 2.4.16 and also had lockups. I am interested in a methodolgy that will help me determine the cause of the lockups. i suspect it is the combnation of the motherboard and the 1.4 Ghz Athlon. The motherboard is inexpensive adn includes integrated sound, lan, and video. Based on the SiS 730 chipset. Not sure it was designed for the 1.4 Ghz Athlon. Gives errors if I enable dma I boot in Linux safe mode, and have the following items in lilo.conf ide=nodma disableapic apm=off hdc=ide-scsi mem=nopentium I have used google to search the web for problem reports, but can't find anything conclusive. I can lock up the machine hard jsut using the find files tool in Konqueror. Copying large files from one partion to another on hard drive will also lock it up. Starting vmware is problematic at best. Sometimes it loads and runs, sometimes it locks up hard. If I use taper from a terminal window within kde it will lock up. I switch to a separate non X console it will run fine. Should I just get a new motherboard? Should i get a new video card? I get sevral hard lockups every day, and I used to get none at all. If I get a new motherboard or video, recommendations would be appreciated. I could get an ASUS A7V133 and use the same RAM. Mike -- Michael A. Coan Woodlawn Foundation 524 North Avenue New Rochelle, NY 10801-3410 tel 914-632-3778 fax 914-632-5502 ration en