I'll give you an experience I had (which may or may not be relevant):
I got a Pentium 90 machine, set up Linux on it, and everything was
working fine, but every so often the keyboard would lock up. It was
only the keyboard -- I run under X, and the mouse still worked,
processes still kept going, etc. but the keyboard was completely
inaccessible. (This usually happened while the machine was doing disk or
other I/O, but that may or may not have any relevance.) I added a root
menu entry to reboot the machine, and this would fix things.
However, the problem got worse over the next month or so and pretty soon
this was happening every hour. In the meantime, I had tried upgrading
kernels, pulling out cards, trying different cards, etc. Finally, after
some very bad experiences trying to convince the company I bought it from
(Access Computer) that they ought to send the motherboard back and give
me a loaner in the meantime so I wouldn't have to sit for three weeks
doing nothing, I gave up and bought a new Biotech 75-180 Mhz Triton
board from NCA, and everything has worked beautifully since.
ben