Mark and All, When I hear "the laptops I lend them have started not working," I have to ask the user several questions. "not working" usually means it won't do what I want, when I want and how I want. It can be a variety of things and nothing at all. It may be that some cache or memory allowance has been exceeded, which may be very specific to the "what I want" part of things. When I encounter this situation I try to get more information about the circumstances and details. Who knows, maybe one cannot be playing Fortnite and while compiling code? Just a thought. Thanks, Ted P On Sat, May 8, 2021 at 12:44 PM Mark Galassi <mark@galassi.org> wrote:

I sometimes get reports from my students that the laptops I lend them have started not working. When I get them back I boot them and they seem to be OK.

I have gone and run the classic unix "crashme" program to stress them with load and threads and memory access, but they go along nicely.

I wonder if anyone has a favorite program to stress the system, disk, display, memory, CPU, ... Display seems important: sometimes the problems I've seen had to do with the video drivers trying to use advanced hardware features that are not well supported. _______________________________________________ nmglug mailing list nmglug@lists.nmglug.org http://lists.nmglug.org/listinfo.cgi/nmglug-nmglug.org