Ubuntu/Gnome stability

[Vincent Trouilliez]

> My hardware? Athlon 1800+, 

Athlon XP 1700+ here... very similar then.

> 4 Maxtor UDMA133 40GB 7200rpm fluid bearing drives... 
> This might sound silly but... have you cleaned the dust-bunnies etc from
> the inside of your case, especially from the fins of your CPU cooler and
> the front air intake, lately?

2 weeks ago I embarked into a 'quiet PC' project. 
I installed a decent power supply, and also took the fan off the CPU
heatsink in order to fit it with speed controller. Upon taking the fan
off, it revealed 2 years worth of dust trapped in the fins of the
heatsink. Didn't bother cleaning it as it would have meant taking the
heatsink off (for a proper job), and the Athlon CPU is so fragile so  I
didn't want to take the risk of damaging the die when fixing it back.
The CPU temperature is constantly at 55C, is that too hot ?
Maybe if I cleaned the fins, it would improve air flow and drop the temp
a little bit. Would that make any difference ?
Also whislt I am at it, am considering replacing my desktop hard drive
by a laptop drive in an attempt to reduce the noise of the heads, when
the disc is accesses. MY disc makes no noise from spinning, but I can
hear the head working when it's accessed, which I don't like. (I value
silence...). DOoes your fluid bearing drive make any difference
regarding head noise, or is it just to reduce spinning noise ?
Sorry for this off topic question ;-)


> You might want to check your RAM as well - 
> Ubuntu does include Memtest86+ which works very well. Let it
> run through as many passes as you can (24hrs is good enough).

A couple of months ago, I bought a used 256MB memory stick, so as to
have 512MB in all. I let the BIOS do it's check 3 times, with success.
Then I let Linux (was Mandrake 9.2 back then) run for 48 hours, and I
didn't notice any problems with apps cvrashing or other weird behaviour,
so I called it a success.
I will take the heatsink out to clea it properly and run Ubuntu memory
test, see what comes out.

Regards,

Vince