On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 2:56 PM, Gordon Messmer <yinyang@eburg.com> wrote:
Google results for "xorg hangs Sandybridge i915" turn up a whole lot of results (sadly).  Among the first page results is one report that a bad BIOS was responsible for the problem.  Have you updated yours?

I haven't updated my bios, will do that right now if there is newer version available. 
 
Has this system ever run a Linux distribution that didn't hang/crash?

Nope, only Fedora 16 and now 17.
 
It may be useful to configure kdump on your system to see if that can capture the cause of the crash.

Any pointers on how to configure kdump?

Thank a lot for these tips!