In recent times my aging desktop has been experiencing lock ups, and I don’t quite know what to make of it.
Specs:
AMD Phenom™ II X4 965 Processor
8gb DDR3
GeForce 8400 GS
I suspect Firefox(97), haven’t experienced lock ups in Chrome, but I don’t use it as much. It’s not just my activity in FF that freezes, the whole system locks and is unresponsive. Is that a plausible scenario? I did check temps and voltages with lm-sensors, everything is well within the norm.
Could it be that my low end graphics card is choking to death on all the code that modern websites deploy? I don’t know, just wondering. Thoughts?
Two things come to my mind (and both could be wrong).
Try the LTS kernel first, maybe that fixes the problem.
Also, it could be the noveau driver, I’ve often experienced system freezing with it. If you are indeed using the noveau driver, try installing the 340 driver from the AUR (it only works with the LTS kernel and will probably break in the future):
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/nvidia-340xx-lts-dkms
In case it doesn’t work, just boot into the TTY (or boot from live ISO, chroot into your system) and remove it.
If none of that helps, and the problem is only with Firefox, try disabling any GPU-related stuff in the settings. If you are watching a lot of YouTube videos, try using your media player of choice, instead of the browser (the video player that is embedded into the YouTube website is quite bad, I never use it). Or consider switching your browser to Ungoogled Chromium.
In any case, rebooting your system by pressing the reset button or cutting power to it is not recommended, since it may cause filesystem corruption. Instead, before it freezes, enable the Magic SysRQ key.
Also, next time you buy a graphics card, make it AMD, life on Linux is so much easier without having to deal with NoVidea’s 
.
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Kresimir, Thanks for the suggestions, I shall explore these soon, I’m still caught up in a family tragedy but am making progress in getting back to normal.
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Sorry to hear about your tragedy. Please take care of yourself and your loved ones.
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Well I was already running the LTS kernel so I installed the 340 driver…will see how that goes. 
Hmmm, had another freeze up, again while in Firefox, was trying to download a 360 deg. image that my brother posted on Facebook from his iphone. I don’t know what to think, but I’m going to run memtest just to rule out that aspect.