The question
Is it possible that Adobe Flash in Ubuntu 12.04 on Firefox could damage my GPU?
History
So… there I was, using my beloved Ubuntu 12.04, Doing some PHP/Javascript/HTML development in Firefox. I was testing using the JQuery SWFObject plugin on some dynamic content….and it had been wokring fine.
Then, testing some of the logic that removes old content and refreshes, I triggered an onclick event to do this to Flash content. There were bugs in my code, causing it to try and instantiate Flash in a DIV that already had Flash content.
My PC froze. Rhythmbox was still playing, but everything else was frozen.
I rebooted, and horror. Black Screen. After much messing around, I was able to get a 640×480 display on main monitor and not detect the second. Reinstalled graphics drivers and so on… but nothing would work. So I upgraded distro to 12.10 and reinstalled the nvidia 331 drivers. Got one session out of it, and since then although Ubuntu will boot with mouse and wallpaper, I have no Unity and not even able to Ctrl-Alt-F1 terminal. Nothing.
Windows is still working, but in windows I'm now getting the (very occasional) message about my display adapter encountering a problem.
It all seems a little too coincidental to me…..? But is it possible?
Best Answer
Not sure if this helps, but I had a failed GPU fan, and so my computer would hang whenever I did anything which was GPU intensive (the temperature would reach 90-100 degrees and auto poweroff). Flash can be GPU intensive, are you sure your GPU is working ok?