KDE's killing my laptop. Literally.

Hmm there's alot of questions popping up for this kind of thing. Which version of KDE is it? What distro? Are there any weird error messages as you work or any patterns such as something silly happening not too long before the lock up?

It could be a serious bug in KDE but I doubt it as this kind of thing would be quickly noticed and fixed. It is probably a bug introduced by the distro or a problem somehow unintendedly caused by you, the installation process, an exotic buggy program or daemon..

We have to find out what is it.

Well, I'm on Ubuntu 6.06 with the stable KDE... not using any weird programs I believe... must be some KDE-specific app if any...
Apart from this hanging, KDE worked like a breeze...
Really, no idea where to look at...

Oops, I switched back to GNOME and after a few hours of working I also got my system frozen. Now I'm on FVWM and I'll let you know the benchmarks. So it seems it's not a KDE issue actually (I wish it was to be frank).
Now 2 options are considered:
- it's caused by some service common to KDE and GNOME
- it's cause by hardware

Hope it's not the second. If this is a software issue then it has to be involved with some recent Dapper updates since I've been using this configuration for more than half a year and I just started to have problems recently.

I was having the same issue with 6.06
But only when browsing with Firefox. I dumped all extensions, that did not seem to help.
Finally, I dumped FireFox and the lock up was gone.

Stay with this issue. I have a hunch you will find what it is.

Question. When you run 6.06 from a CLEAN install, nothing new added to the stock install, or when running from the Live CD, I have a hunch you won't have this problem?

If you can run without a lockup on clean install, or from the Live CD then you will need to think about which packages you install that might be causing this.

Let us know.

I wasn't going to do a clean install or live cd test of dapper (edgy's coming anyway), but that would make sense. It would be noticed and fixed long ago if there was such a problem on clean install. So yeah I'd bet the problem wouldn't be there then. I know I didn't have the problem when I was surfing with a clean install of dapper.

I also think the Firefox is not alone in causing this issue.. something else must be there triggering this...At least that would make sense, since Firefox is there from the start.

Just to carry your thought out one more step.

FireFox (not the convicted here, just one of the suspects) updates your original installation so watch out for that. Plus, I also suspect that extensions also can create issues.

Once I deleted FireFox and all it's extensions,and re-installed FireFox, my lock up issues were gone.
I share this because sometimes a clean install is not necessary and things can be rescued with your present install.

Thanks for sharing.

I switched back to FVWM-Crystal and I haven't encountered a freeze, yet (2 days now). However, there are situations that X seems to be freezing every now and then (for 20-30 seconds) and after that time, I get a Skype message
I knew the proprietary software was evil but I didn't suspect it's so bad... Even the network doesn't work from the outside when this happens... I will quit using Skype for a while and then see what happens. Stay tuned, it's becoming interesting

I am staying tuned.

Btw, I think there are alternatives to Skype, like Ekiga.

I use Jabbin with jingle support (Jabber VoIP) so it would be best to be able to use just this one IM program. But... explain it to my friends. I have something like 10 people using Skype, 10 using MSN, 20 using Jabber and the rest using Poland-specific networks (Gadu-Gadu and Tlen). All of them except Skype are supported with Jabber transports, so I usually used Psi and Skype only. Still, it would be nice to be able to quit Skype as well...

"look, skype is evil. It hangs and crashes my computer all the time. here, this thing works well for everyone. go use that. skype sucks so much that I won't be using it any longer"