"Jeffrey L. Taylor"
Quoting Doug McGarrett
: [snip] I am going to try another brand shortly. (I don't think it's a hardware problem. I'm running the hated XP Windows on the same machine without difficulty.)
This is not a very reliable indicator. WinXP and Linux stress hardware in different ways. Run memtest86 overnight to check memory. This is often the case of runs okay under Windows and fails under Linux. Also Linux uses low power/throttled back states that Windows never or seldom uses.
There is also a potential for Linux to choke on the computer's buggy ACPI implementation, as well as it not doing IDE dma 100% properly for certain chipset/drive combinations. But I have installed 9.2 on two of my computers and in spite of the fact that none of my computers can read the double layer DVD and chew gum at the same time, I am quite happy with 9.2 (I had to copy the double layer DVD to a hard disk using the 9.2 rescue system on a totally quiet machine in order to install -- any other process running at the same time will cause them to hang, including the yast installer.) On two other machines I left 9.1 running and I can see no reason to update them so long as they are performing their functions, and SuSE keeps issuing updates. The bottom line as I see it is, if you are doing development work you need SuSE 9.2 on at least some of your machines.