I looked at your inxi output.

You should have mentioned that that thing is over 15 years old, as the diagnoses would have taken that into account. You have the AMD RV670 Northbridge, incorporating one of the poorest graphics efforts in the 21st century. AMD were just starting to play catch-up in 2007. I had the RS690M Northbridge, and that box gave up the ghost in 2015. But the graphics always ran behind the sound if you used fullscreen on the 1280×800 screen.

You need swap. the size of the swap is not critical if you have enough memory and do not intend to use hibernate. If you intend to hibernate then you need enough swap for that function, and it is based upon how much memory you have (more memory requires more swap, not less). If you intend to run large applications, applications to gulp memory in huge chunks and not give it back (looking at YOU java!), or run many applications at one it can take more (sometimes a LOT more) memory and throw more at swap so you need more.

I cannot guess how much of that describes you or how well. If you are returning your machine to the amount of memory it had before, and the swap was enough before, it should be enough going forward. If that changes, if you go to hibernate and it tells you "NO", then you will know what you need to do to fix that.

It has worked fine to date. Currently I'm using a separate graphics card I had before with the motherboard and it worked fine no lagging. As long as it works I'm fine. Thanks for your help.

I'm going to go with 4 Gbs of RAM. I read up a little on increasing SWAP after-the-fact and sounds a little daunting. I don't use hibernate at all usually use the machine then turn it off after. I think one of the RAM cards had a bad cell or something similar to a vehicle battery and it caused this freezing issue. I've been trying it on 1 Gb of RAM and it is taxing at times but works. Thanks for your input. I'll report back once the new RAM is installed and tested.

I'd check the ram is seating properly in it's sockets, and is clean. There is memtest86 which tests ram and is an option on many install dvds.

Making swap space is easy. if you have a few GB of space on /

1. touch /swap
2. sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swap bs=1M count=2048
3. sudo mkswap /swap
4. sudo swapon /swap

Then add a line to /etc/fstab somewhere after the / entry Of course, running from swap slows things down, but you survive.

I installed 4 GB of RAM today and the computer appears to be running fine no freezes no beeps. I haven't adjusted RAM as yet using the 1 GB the system assigned when I installed LMDE 5 with only 1 GB RAM installed in the machine. So after all this, it was the RAM. One of the modules must of had a bad sector similar to when a cell goes bad in a car battery and the battery doesn't work, same with the RAM. This is what I figure since all is good now...so far. I just have to see if I can increase the SWAP size without causing another issue. Thanks to everyone that provided assistance suggestions, greatly appreciated. In the end this computer now has a "newer" PSU, SSD hard drive, a separate graphics card and now new and more RAM. Hopefully should be good for a few more years.

Increasing swap is not necessary unless you need to be able to hibernate, in which case swap size needs to be ≥RAM size.

The more RAM you have installed, the more RAM Linux will utilize as disk cache, so don't be confused by why usage seems higher now that you have more .