Harddrive or Power Supply?

[CaptainSarcastic]

For me, it's not the watts that I pay attention to. It's the amps on the +12V rails. Some power supplies have multiple +12V rails. The more amps in +12V, the better. The Corsair HX650 is a 650 watt PSU, and it delivers a full 52 amps on the +12V. That's pretty stout. Other 650 watt PSUs may not deliver the same output. For instance, a Diablotek 650 watt PSU only delivers 46 amps on the +12V rail. It's the +12V rail that's the most important.

Another thing I look for, is a minimum of 80 plus Bronze certification.

I will second this, especially when it comes to a system with a higher-powered graphics card.  A lot of sites will only list the wattage required for a graphics card, and do not mention the amps.  Under full operation a decent GPU can be drawing a lot of amps, and they can quickly kill or damage a PSU that is not capable of supplying it.  For my most recent build I bought an OCZ StealthStream2 rated at 600W that puts out a total of 64 amps on the 12V rail for this very reason - I deliberately went for more headroom than I needed.

I've seen PSUs rated at 500W and higher that only put out 24A or less on the 12V rail, leading to situations where the wattage looks fine for a card but the amps are lower than they should be.  If I remember correctly the OP is running a GeForce 7900 which should be looking for around 20A, so as long as his PSU is healthy and putting out at least 20A on the 12V rail then he should be fine.

[Neo]

You can try creating a new account and logging in as that user to see if the problem persists. Often, Firefox addons will cause problems. You can try renaming the .mozilla folder in your home directory to see if that helps. If either of those cure the problem, change your renamed folder back to .mozilla, start Firefox and disable all addons. Then, try adding them back, one at a time.

You are fully up to date in Synaptic, aren't you?

Yup I already tried that and it didn't help.
FF crashed on a while I was viewing a thread on this forum.
It contained two videos, I watched and all was fine, I logged in to leave a comment and the videos no longer displayed but an error message was in their place indicating that the Adobe plugin had crashed, then FF crashed and gave me the error message that I am all too familiar with.
And double Yup to my OS being up to date via Synaptic.

[horusfalcon]

Hi, It's the OP here, just thought I'd give you guys an update.

Well I haven't had anymore problems with suddenly losing power or not being able to access my HDD.

Any idea what you did to alleviate this problem?

On the other hand I have had FF crash suddenly, without warning, several times since my last post.
The last time it happened was just a few minutes ago.

I doubt it's my CPU overheating as I was listening to online radio via VLC during the last crash and it was unaffected.

Nah... but you can make sure if you use the temperature monitoring widgets already available in KDE.  It's beginning to sound more like a Flash issue, if I read your other posts correctly.  Flash for Linux has gotten more tempermental lately, almost as if Adobe doesn't love us anymore or something...

I am tempted to do a new, fresh install of PCLinuxOS and try my luck with that, but losing all of my current settings and tweaks would be a real pain in the A$$.

However since I am currently multibooting eight different distros and really only use PCLinux, I may sacrifice one of the other distros so that I can do a fresh install and gradually tweak it to my tastes.

Are you using completely separate /home partitions for each distro?  Some are more sensitive to cross-pollination of configuration files than others.  This may be a possible source for your problems.

If however FF crashes on the new install then I don't know what to do.
I love to say that I would pull out all of my hair but that ain't saying much these days.  

EDIT:  By the way I thought that a power supply would only crank out as much power as is required of it, i.e. a 600 Watt PSU will not draw 600 Watts if only 400 is demanded of it - correct?

Well, not exactly... It depends strongly on its design.  A more powerful unit with a heavy core transformer will require a certain quiescent current to keep the cores saturated, so a larger unit will require more at lower power levels than a similar unit rated for less.  Oh, and by the way, if its rated for 600W output, it's likely to draw a bit more than that in input power due to resistive and reactive losses.

If the design is more up to date, (uses more a more modern configuration), it is possible for the power supply to idle at much lower input currents.  This is a good thing if being energy-conscious is part of your outlook.  Definitely look at all the information you can lay hands on, and consider the design of the unit as well as its ratings to make your best choice.

Oh, and Firefox crashing?  It goes through spasms like this, it seems.  One release of Firefox will give folks headaches which subsequent releases will attempt to fix until the development team is ready to release the next 'evolutionary' version with a new rendering engine or some such, and the cycle begins again.  We're definitely in the extended maintenance phase of Firefox's life-cycle.

Don't tear out what hair you have left over that.  For all its shortcomings, Firefox is still one of the better web browsers out there, and deserves our support.  (Hey, it could be worse; we could all be still running Mosaic. )

Later On,
D