My computer is presenting some weird behaviour, and I don't know what to try next to work out what's going wrong.
First the behaviour. The computer occasionally freezes. I can move the mouse, and the cursor changes (e.g., to a movement arrow, hand, text cursor etc). But nothing else on the screen moves. Counters don't count, windows don't move, clicks do nothing. Waiting doesn't help - it doesn't wake back up.
I can CTRL-ALT-F5 to an alternative terminal session and see what's running. Nothing seems to be maxing out any resources.
As far as I can tell, it's not tied to any one single application. I've tried to use the computer with different apps and it seems to still happen whatever I stop running, short of killing of Xorg and nautilus, obviously.
I've tried the xorg-edgers repo. No improvement. I've disabled compiz (I think) - no improvement. I've looked in a few log files but couldn't see anything that would indicate where the problem is (though I might well have been looking in the wrong place).
My next options are to reinstall and/or start swapping out hardware. But before I do that, can anyone tell me what can cause crashes like this, where the mouse can move but nothing else does? Or can anyone tell me which logs files I should be checking? Is there anything else I can try, to diagnose the problem? Is it likely to be a hardware issue?
The computer is a vanilla Dell XPS 8300 - details at http://dell.com/uk/p/xps-8300 - except for the graphics card, which is an ATI Radeon X1300 Pro.
