Thank you all who contributed.

I was hoping for some log that could maybe save some info when in a hurry, sensing an eminent crash or an emergency, but that doesn’t really make sense, does it? - If it crashes, it crashes. There’s probably no time to dump anything to disk. Otherwise the crash would have been prevented.

Anyway, some paths have been opened for when I have time to dig in a little bit deeper.

I’ll quickly find something else to annoy you ASAP. ;-)

I can’t remember when I bought it, it must be newer than that, but concerning the “bargain bin prebuilt” status… It certainly was cheap. That’s why I bought it.

I’ll have to take a look at that. But OMG!

lines 1-46/1743603 0%

How many pages are 1743603 of lines? An entire bookshelf?

Besides, I have no idea what all that means!.. I guess I’ll just have to sit, one day, or month, and go through it all…

Only when it’s idle for a while? That would point to power saving or suspend. You could try changing those to see if it affects the situation.

That’s my feeling as well. It’s set to suspend after 20mn and the power button in set to suspend, so maybe if I try to suspend and wake back up several times, one of the times it will fail… God! I am really not in the mood for that!.. Let’s see…

But yes, hardware. And I would suspect the display controller in particular. I’ve seen many that glitch when in power saving.

Hum!..

$ lspci
 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation HD Graphics 620 (rev 02)

Also, have you checked for bios updates?

I updated the bios on an asus PN40 before and bricked it, so… didn’t try in this one. It’s my workhorse. :-|

Thanks.

I thought there could be some place in logs the system could write error messages to. Even hardware derived.

I’ve been going through /var/log/* and found thousand of scary messages, but can’t really make sense of any of those.

One thing you could do is try to ssh into the system when it’s locked up and

Good idea. I’ll do that next time.

Well… The power button does work to boot the system back up. So…?

It’s a small desktop computer Asus VivoMini VM65, not easy to swap parts.

Asus doesn’t even have a picture of it anymore. Here’s a bunch.

What system logs do you think I should look first, and what should I be looking for?

Any expression I could grep?