On Wednesday 03 August 2005 9:14 pm, Chip Cooper wrote:

I am running suse 9.2, KDE 3.4.2 and kernel 2.6.8-24, and have been having an annoying problem that seems to be getting worse. Whenever I play either a mp3 or listen to streaming music from the net, the system will freeze completely--not even able to switch to terminal & I end up having to reboot. Now it is happening if I play mpegs as well. No luck with Google and not sure how to proceed in debugging this issue.  I am beginning to wonder if it is a hardware problem or IRQ issue, because a while ago I gave 9.3 a try, and it would still freeze when playing mp3 or streaming music. Pretty clueless. Any advice or pointing me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

Chip

Usually freezes/lockups like this are caused by faulty hardware, bad drivers or if its an onboard item (video, sound, LAN, etc) possible BIOS issues. If your soundcard is onboard the mainboard, make sure you have the latest BIOS for the mainboard installed, double check the BIOS settings for the soundcard, disable it in the BIOS and find a cheap add-in soundcard card and try that. If you really want to find the root cause then research your mainboard and its onboard sound chip and its driver/module. IRQ issues used to be an issue but with more modern hardware that is not usually the problem. By modern I mean around 2000 or later. If its older than this it could be IRQ issues. Are you able to isolate the soundcard to its own IRQ in the BIOS? Your symptoms appear similar to some video problems that can lockup a system and their resolution is usually driver updates if it isn't faulty hardware. Stan