I have a Compaq R4000 laptop with 2GB of RAM, running Ubuntu Linux 9.10. It is randomly locking up on me, approximately once every two days. I have a second partition with Windows XP Home installed, and I have had the system lock up in XP as well, meaning I believe this is a hardware issue. I have run two passes of Memtest86+ with no errors.

The system has a fan that has died, so I initially suspected overheating. However the system just locked up on me while I was in the middle of typing a script to warn me / shut down if the temperature was too high. When the lockup happened the temperature was 88°F, so I am now starting to believe that may not be the issue.

When the system locks up, I cannot SSH in nor ping it. Nothing shows in syslog when I reboot. I have configured it to send syslog messages to a local server as well and no messages appear on that server when the lockup happens. I am open to any and all advice!