finding the cause of repeated & random crashes

[Fourbissime]

hi.

since last week, my computer is doing random crashes. The ugly ones : nothing respond, the sound buffer looping, and then it reboots.

i'm usually running X when such things are happening. It started approximately when i installed my new DVD burner. Since then, I tried to remove it, but it was still crashing without it.

To be more precise about the time, it started crashing on last sunday. And suddenly around wednesday it came back to normal. I could use again X without any problems.

And then tonight it starts again. What i did tonight :
- experiments with jackd
- turning on the framebuffer thing to have a 1024 console (i'm quite glad to have it right now !)
- and of course, rebooting in order to reload the kernel.

So i'm wondering what can be the causes of such troubles ... hardware ? software ?

Anyone have a few tricks to pinpoint hardware problems ?