'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe

So, I'm happily listening to my new Gladiator soundtrack, and reach across to turn off the printer/scanner/copier/coffee-maker (an HP psc 1215). At which point the gentle strings turns into a harsh buzzing, and Windows bluescreens.

Well, I suppose I should restart my computer soon anyway to finish installing the latest patches, but, but, but, grrryyaarrrrrgghh!!! I will reboot my computer as and when *I* want to, not when some two-bit driver written by some utter moron decides to scribble over the system tables and make Windows explode messily. Yes, I'm looking at you, HP. And you, Microsoft. All I did was turn the bloody printer off!

Now I have to go and pick up the pieces of the two programs I was working on, hope that I have saved any changes I made to them, tidy up the playlist for XMPlay and re-add the music I just added, and generally work out what I was doing and get it back to the state it was in.

Grrryyaarrrrggggghhhhhhhh!


STOP: 0x00000050 ()xFFFFFFF0,0x00000000,0x8044E873,0x00000000)
PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA
Address 8044E873 base at 80400000, DateStamp 44925809 - ntoskrnl.exe

x-posted to techsupport_ot and boggyb

This is the... seventh time in a little over a day that Odysseus (my linux box) has just frozen solid on me. No disk activity, no response to pings, no response to any keys pressed on the keyboard, no blinking underscore on the screen, no nothing. Just frozen solid.

It's not overheating. The heatsink on the Pentium 133 isn't even warm. It's not occuring at a fixed time (I've had between 5min and 2hrs uptime on it before freezing).

It *could* be a combination of saturated CPU and heavyish network traffic taking it down, but I am at a loss as to how that'd do it. It could also be memory, so I'll run memtest86 on it tomorrow, and see if I get anything. I'm rather screwed if it is memory, as this box is around 10 years old.

Anyway, ideas?

It's an IBM Aptiva with a P133, 48MB of ram (across 3 SIMMs), a 20GB and a 80GB disk, generic CD-ROM, ATi Rage Pro PCI graphics card, Netgear 10Mb ISA ethernet and some PC-Line (apparently rebadged Myson) 10/100 PCI ethernet. It's running Slackware 10.1, with the 2.6 kernel (the 2.4 kernel had a seriously b0rked driver for the IDE chipset that panicked if there was only one device on the second ide channel). I'm not afraid to go mucking around with the hardware, or whisper mystic incanctations into the kernel. There is, however, an absence of goats, but I don't have a SCSI chain so I shouldn't need any.

All ideas that don't involve etherkillers welcome.