Many seg faults while compiling (Dell i8200) - troubleshoot?

[jeffrice]

Hi,
My sincere thanks to anyone who manages to read all this... Dell tech support is useless and I'm hoping to get some better info. I'm also afraid of sending them the computer back and then them not finding anything wrong with it.

I was so excited to get gentoo running on my laptop and everything looked peachy, but as the compiling got hot and heavy, I started getting lots and lots of seg faults. This was a windows machine that has occassional crashes/blue screen errors, which makes me highly suspicious of a hardware fault.

During the course of all the seg faults and having to restart my emerges, an unmounted fat32 drive (that was supposed to get shared by both linux and windows) got completely corrupted (twice).

I've run the Dell diagnostics which don't find any problems with the machine, but obviously there is a major fault here. But where to start looking?

1) It's not video, I know that as I've replaced the card and the error still occurs (at least in windows.)

2) I'm fairly sure it's not heat, because again when the crash occurs in windows, the cpu temp is not excessive.

3) Why would a seg fault while compiling corrupt an unmounted drive? I haven't experienced any data loss in the crashes under windows. Does this suggest a hard drive problem? (surface scan came back a-ok.)

4) Memory? Windows is pretty stable (as far as that goes, haha) and when it BSODs on me, it says a device driver caused the problem. Not very informative and I've always suspected the video card, but as I said replacing it with 2 different cards did not resolve the issue.

I would adjust memory timings, etc but of course the Dell BIOS doesn't permit this.

Many thanks,
Jeff