Powerbook crashes about once a week

[sowlerrmgh]

Hi,

I have a Powerbook G4 which was bought in 2003:

12" Screen
1 Ghz G4
768 MB RAM
Running Tiger
Hard disk 90%full

However recently it has started to crash about once a week. I know it is old but I expect a laptop to last more than 4 years (I only use it for listening to music, watching video, internet and word processing - not hard tasks). I hope to have it another year or so and then upgrade to a macbook. Can anyone think of anyways to stop it crashing so often?

sowlerrmgh

 

[richard.mac]

what do you mean by crash? kernel panic? freezes? apps unexpectadely quitting?
you dont have a lot of ram so if your doing ram extensive tasks such as running a lot of apps at the same time you could run out of ram and the OS will page to the hard disk which is much slower that ram. this results in a huge slow down or freeze which you might be seeing. i suggest you get more ram. especially since leopard is nearing. itll make your OS X snappier!

 

[sowlerrmgh]

In the last month I have had 1 kernal panic and about 3 freezes. The freezes happened when i was on the internet - so i don't think it is lack of ram.

 

[mad jew]

Use Console in the Utilities folder to check the crash logs to see if they've picked up any hints as to why it's freezing and panicking. What peripherals do you have plugged in? I realise you have 10% free space, but how much actual free space do you have on your drive, in gigabytes? Maybe try running the Apple Hardware Test from the original discs that came with your machine too.