[conspire] Crashing Problems, Suspect IRQ Mismatch, Maybe BIOS

[mark at weisler-saratoga-ca.us]

Hi,
I'm having problems with a box I just assembled and would appreciate
help if someone has time to consider this. Very briefly, the mouse and
keyboard freeze after about one to five minutes of operation.
Ctl-Alt-Delete is not recognized and a hard reboot is required.
Sometimes, as it fails, a faint blue stripe appears across the screen.

The Symptoms

The symptoms are described above. It happens consistently. I have
noticed that if I just open a terminal and stay in the terminal I can
operate slightly longer prior to a crash. This slightly suggests that
switching contexts (or whatever the term) between various X windows
exercises the problem area leading to  a crash.

Suspicions
I suspect an IRQ problem.
Below is a listing of /proc/interrupts and also a dmesg listing.
IRQ #9 looks suspicious because it appears that two devices are assigned
to it.
I also suspect that my BIOS should be updated. (Please see the detail
posted at pastebin.ca, mentioned below.)

I would also appreciate any clues on where to read how to do a bios
upgrade without using Widows.


Steps I've Taken
I have had the symptoms described about running under the following
conditions:
...all 32 bit distributions....
1. Sidux live CD.
2. Sidux installed
3. Kubuntu 7.04 live CD
4. Kubuntu 7.04 installed


The Box
The computer is home-made consisting of an Intel motherboard and Pentium
4, described below.
The video card is a Radeon 9600 SE 128M. No other cards are in the box.
There are two new IDE drives on the same ribbon connector.


processor       : 0
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 15
model           : 2
model name      : Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.66GHz
stepping        : 9
cpu MHz         : 2666.614
cache size      : 512 KB
fdiv_bug        : no
hlt_bug         : no
f00f_bug        : no
coma_bug        : no
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 2
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge
mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe up
cid xtpr
bogomips        : 5337.58
clflush size    : 64

MemTotal:      1035080 kB




More Evidence
More evidence is posted at http://www.pastebin.ca/503589

Thanks for reading and considering this.
Mark