Is There A Way A To See Why My Computer Keeps Freezing?

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Software-wise, can I tell what causes my computer to freeze?

OS: Ubuntu 17.10 (x64)

From my own experiences with computers (good couple of decades), the most-common reasons for computers to become unresponsive is either because of a badly coded program (causing memory leaks), lack of sufficient RAM to handle all of the simultaneous processes that were loaded, or sometimes just plan over-heating.

Software typically won't tell you what causes your system to hang, but you can narrow it down, filtering out the root-causes that might be affecting performance, just running one program at a time instead of several. Hopefully it's not a critical hardware-issue (such as failing hard-drive that might eventually crash; because such errors typically wipe a lot of the data that you might have, and are very expensive to repair, due to needing to go through a specialised recovery service such as OnTrack if it does happen, and you might expect only between 10% to 50% of your files being recovered from a crashed hard-drive, if you're lucky).

I don't have much information about your issue but I would probably recommend running some diagnostics-tests on your system in order to measure performance for each of the critical-areas of functioning.

I could be wrong, but I think absolute freezes are often caused by a serious strain on the CPU, sometimes overheating or a drain on RAM.

I don't use Unix (even though I really should) so I don't know how you diagnose the performance and check for processes but that's what I'd do to begin with. I'd guess you'd probably find there are a lot of processes going on that are intensive. My personal recommendations;

- Clean out your computer; use an air duster. These are particularly effective in some circumstances.

- Physically feel the computer to see if it is hot. If it is, it may be overheating and require a new fan / heatsink. Alternatively, it may simply be suffering from overuse or intensive programs not able to be dealt with using your current hardware.

- On your next session, keep an eye on the processes. There may be something that suddenly causes the resources to spike.

- If you're using software, check the required specifications. This may be causing problems with your hardware.

- Check for viruses; Linux is incredibly prone to these, and they do more damage than you may expect.


This is a newbie opinion; don't tear your computer apart on my opinions alone. If it's a serious problem, take it to somebody with expertise in this area.

I hope you sort it out soon.

Once you have followed all of the previous suggestions, try changing out your keyboard (if it has a separate keyboard). One of the computers that I am responsible for had such a keyboard; it would either stop responding completely or repeat the last key presseddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd

I hear that baseball bats are a great tool to handle those problems. OK..........I'm even irritating myself now so I'll shut up!