The title says it all. Sometimes it’ll be fine all day or, like this morning, it’ll die three times in two hours.
I have been working with the company that sold me the machine for a long time, but they’ve been unable to find out what’s wrong and their final idea is basically to reinstall the OS. But I use the machine for my day job and I’m worried about losing too much time.
The machine is this one: https://junocomputers.com/product/mercury-v3/ with an extra 4TB hard drive, and more memory (it didn’t cost this when I bought it!). I’ve bought from Juno before and they’ve been fine. And they’ve been very helpful in trying to find the cause.
The primary symptoms are simply that the machine grinds to a halt (the sound will stutter, mouse movement judders to a halt in a couple of seconds) and the fans go into overdrive.
All indicative, to me, that something is grabbing all the processing power. The screen continues to operate, and the bluetooth speaker does not disconnect.
I’m running the latest nVidia drivers (I know it says 595 in some of this data but that was before I upgraded to 610, which made no difference) and here’s some of the data Juno asked for (though they said it looked fine to them):
Wed Oct 7 13:02:11 2026
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 595.91.07 Driver Version: 595.91.07 CUDA Version: 13.2 |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| GPU Name Persistence-M | Bus-Id Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan Temp Perf Pwr:Usage/Cap | Memory-Usage | GPU-Util Compute M. |
| | | MIG M. |
|=========================================+========================+======================|
| 0 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Off | 00000000:01:00.0 On | N/A |
| 39% 37C P8 14W / 145W | 908MiB / 8151MiB | 6% Default |
| | | N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes: |
| GPU GI CI PID Type Process name GPU Memory |
| ID ID Usage |
|=========================================================================================|
| 0 N/A N/A 7434 G /usr/bin/gnome-shell 223MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 7905 G /usr/bin/Xwayland 2MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 9861 C+G /usr/bin/ptyxis 26MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 10435 G .../8969/usr/lib/firefox/firefox 534MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 16666 C+G /usr/bin/gnome-text-editor 22MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
---------------------------------
uname -r
7.0.0-38-generic
----------------------------------
ls -la /boot
total 305776
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Oct 1 14:41 .
drwxr-xr-x 20 root root 4096 Aug 15 09:59 ..
-rw------- 1 root root 11018537 Sep 2 10:35 System.map-7.0.0-34-generic
-rw------- 1 root root 11028836 Sep 4 08:31 System.map-7.0.0-38-generic
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 308473 Sep 2 10:35 config-7.0.0-34-generic
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 308501 Sep 4 08:31 config-7.0.0-38-generic
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Jan 1 1970 efi
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Oct 1 14:41 grub
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 27 Oct 1 14:40 initrd.img -> initrd.img-7.0.0-38-generic
-rw------- 1 root root 127777828 Oct 1 07:06 initrd.img-7.0.0-34-generic
-rw------- 1 root root 127696099 Oct 1 14:41 initrd.img-7.0.0-38-generic
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 27 Oct 1 14:40 initrd.img.old -> initrd.img-7.0.0-34-generic
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 156672 Nov 29 2025 mt86+ia32
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 161280 Nov 29 2025 mt86+x64
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 24 Oct 1 14:40 vmlinuz -> vmlinuz-7.0.0-38-generic
-rw------- 1 root root 17303944 Sep 2 10:37 vmlinuz-7.0.0-34-generic
-rw------- 1 root root 17320328 Sep 4 08:54 vmlinuz-7.0.0-38-generic
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 24 Oct 1 14:40 vmlinuz.old -> vmlinuz-7.0.0-34-generic
apt policy linux-firmware-nvidia-graphics
linux-firmware-nvidia-graphics:
Installed: 20260319.git217ca6e4-0ubuntu1.1
Candidate: 20260319.git217ca6e4-0ubuntu1.1
Version table:
*** 20260319.git217ca6e4-0ubuntu1.1 500
500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu resolute-updates/main amd64 Packages
500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu resolute-updates/main i386 Packages
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
20260319.git217ca6e4-0ubuntu1 500
500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu resolute/main amd64 Packages
500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu resolute/main i386 Packages
nvidia-smi
Wed Oct 7 13:41:20 2026
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 610.57.04 KMD Version: 610.57.04 CUDA UMD Version: 13.3 |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| GPU Name Persistence-M | Bus-Id Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan Temp Perf Pwr:Usage/Cap | Memory-Usage | GPU-Util Compute M. |
| | | MIG M. |
|=========================================+========================+======================|
| 0 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Off | 00000000:01:00.0 On | N/A |
| 39% 40C P8 15W / 145W | 803MiB / 8151MiB | 7% Default |
| | | N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes: |
| GPU GI CI PID Type Process name GPU Memory |
| ID ID Usage |
|=========================================================================================|
| 0 N/A N/A 7226 G /usr/bin/gnome-shell 275MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 7741 G /usr/bin/Xwayland 2MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 11008 G .../8969/usr/lib/firefox/firefox 422MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 13167 C+G /usr/bin/ptyxis 30MiB |
OK, so things that seem to mitigate the problem: Running sound/video apps.
Never stops the problem but apparently puts it off for longer.
It happened once during boot-up. It happens even if I run nothing – if I just boot up the machine and leave it.
Oh yes: top and htop , I have tried to see whether there’s anything that jumps to the top of the list when things stop working but there’s nothing obvious or common. I guess those monitors stop working before it becomes obvious.
I have also analysed journalctl to hell, and again there’s nothing in common or any indication of an error. Because it’s not an error? Just something taking over.
I realise this is a long shot but maybe someone has seen something like it?
