My SUSE 10.0 system has been crashing occasionally for some while. I have
finally traced the problem to use of the NVidia drivers and my graphics
card.

The crashes have previously been erratic, but I have now found a particular
sequence of actions that reproduces the problem every time. Here it is:-

* Start up Googleearth
* Zoom in on London, until the roads and railway lines are clearly visible
* Now drag the picture upwards and to the left
* My system freezes almost immediately. If I am listening to an audio
stream (eg BBC Radio) it simply repeats the last second or two over and
over again. The only way to get the system going again is to do a hard
reboot.

As a workaround, I am currently not using the NVidia drivers. I do this by
replacing

Driver "nvidia"

with

Driver "nv"

in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

This makes my system stable, but of course I now have no 3D graphics (and I
rather miss Tuxracer!)

My graphics card is based on GeForce4 MX 440. My motherboard is an MSI 845
Ultra 845 with a 1.6 GHz Pentium 4 and 256 Mb DDR RAM.

I have tried installing the latest drivers:-

Latest Version: 1.0-8762
and
Latest Legacy GPU version: 1.0-7182,

but neither of these solve the problem.

Can anyone help?

Chris Gordon-Smith
www.simsoup.info
Email: Use the address on my homepage