I’m gonna be honest, I don’t know what any of these updates will actually do, but I’m guessing it’s pretty damn cool

Yeah, all evidence points away from faulty memory, but for whatever reason I can’t shake the feeling that it is.

Let’s say her CPU has been water cooled for a long, long time, without ever receiving maintenance, she’s had that computer for at least 7 years, and has never opened it once, and it was a hand-me-down from her dad, so I can’t say whether he took good care of it. Do you think that could have damaged it in some way?

I did consider trying that, but I’m just not sure how easy it would be to switch distros. I did make sure she set up her home directory as a separate partition, so that should make it easier, but the rest is still unfamiliar to me.

If SysRq key commands (reisub) worked on this system before the freeze

Yeahh, I only got SysRq commands working like an hour ago, because I didn’t realize that fedora had it off by default.

different kernel versions.

Assuming you literally just mean different versions of the kernel, it’s highly unlikely this would help, this issue has persisted over multiple kernels and even after upgrading from fedora 42 to fedora 43.

reviewing syslog/journalctl from that time after rebooting.

Ahhh, for some reason I had it in my head that rebooting cleared the syslog

I’m not sure if changing the nvidia driver version would help, because like I said, it happens on both neuveau and proprietary.

Interesting, I have noticed that every time this happens, her camera usually gets fucked up for a little while. I guess it’s possible that it has something to do with that, I’ll have to check that next time it happens. That’s the only usb device she has plugged in that I’m suspicious of. The only other things she has are her mouse, keyboard, microphone, wireless headset dongle, and wifi adapter.

If you don’t mind me asking, what are the benefits of su over sudo? I’ve heard that some people (like you) only use su instead sudo, but I haven’t really seen the reasons for why