I installed a new video driver (yesterday) and some of my problems have gone away. The system has not crashed since but it has ground to an impossibly slow crawl just once. It took 3 mins to slide the mouse pointer across the screen and a further 5 mins to open the system monitor. A couple of mins later it showed everything normal, just gnome and firefox using up to 8% of cpu, everything else sleeping. Still only 9% memory, no swapping, no network activity.......
It was like the clocks had all been changed from GHz to KHz!. A hard reset cleared it and everything seems OK now.
I have noticed that if you leave a Youtube tab open in firefox the network traffic ramps up until it consumes all of our broadband. You have to kill all of the firefox windows to stop it. Anyone know what is happening when this happens?
Rans6....