Computer lock up

[momo]

I have having a little trouble and I am hoping that someone can shed some light on the problem/solution. I am running redhat 7.3.
I just installed a new motherboard ( abit kr7a-raid ) and a Athlon XP 1800+ ...have 256 mb DDR and my computer locks up completely when I try to "unshn" ( unshn is the linux version of MKW ) a file. unshn uses shorten and is used to convert .shn files to .wav files. I never had this problem w/ my kt7a w/ 1.13 T-Bird. It locks up everytime now. I had "top" running and it seems as though the lockup may be occuring because of CPU usage going way up.. No messages come up, that I can see, except for a segmentation fault. Any ideas why my CPU is crapping out?
I don't have a windows box to test if this happens w/ windows so I am not sure if it is a true "linux" problem. Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.

TIA

Mike

 

[momo]

Anybody? I have a 300 watt power supply does anyone think that might be the cause....but why does it seem like the processor is being all used up? Just looking for some ideas.

Mike

 

[momo]

Update: It "seems" that it may have been a heat issue. I cleaned up the processor and heatsink and applied some new thermal compound and now I seem to be stable..... We will see what happens.

Mike

 

[earthman]

You may have found the problem right off. That kind of problem is often caused by a heat spike as CPU cycles are maxed out.