Applications randomly quit on my PowerBook

[Lobos]

I just bought my first Apple in years in July and everything has been great until last week. I'm not sure what happened but all of a sudden applications have started to randomly quit on me and I have no idea what to do about it.

I first noticed it when I tried to attach a file to an email using Mail and it just quit right there. It happens everytime. I also can't save file attachments people have sent me without it quiting. Safari will quit sometimes, Firefox does the same. Safari's history has vanished and it won't log any new websites I go to and after going to a few websites it will stop loading any and I have to switch to firefox. Just about any application I have used has randomly quit on me or frozen up since this started happening. I have even had the entire system freeze up several times which before I was extremely happy to have said hadn't happend to me once in the entire 3 months I had owned this computer.

No, I'm not going to switch back to a PC, but as a mac newbie I have no idea where to go from here. Anyone else had this problem? Do I need to do a full system reinstall? If so, any tips on backing up files on the mac that I would want to save?

Thanks!

 

[Sogo]

Well, I'm sorry that you are having such problems. Have you tried to repair permissions? I dont know how if you know what that is, but just download onyx from www.macupdate.com repair and such.

Also, how random/frequent are the crashes? Did you install any new ram possibly?

 

[Lobos]

I tried repairing permissions a few days ago using Disk Utility. I installed half a gig of ram when I bought the computer, but that was 3 months ago and never hurt it. The only things I did recently was 1) add a new user account (previously it was only mine) and 2) update to itunes 6 and the new quicktime update last week. The same problems occur on the other user account. Applications quiting is quite frequent. At least something will quit on me every time I use the computer.

 

[Frisco]

I tried repairing permissions a few days ago using Disk Utility. I installed half a gig of ram when I bought the computer, but that was 3 months ago and never hurt it. The only things I did recently was 1) add a new user account (previously it was only mine) and 2) update to itunes 6 and the new quicktime update last week. The same problems occur on the other user account. Applications quiting is quite frequent. At least something will quit on me every time I use the computer.

Download OnyX and run all the Maintenance and Cleaning tools to see if that helps.

 

[mad jew]

It still could be bad RAM. Sometimes it can take quite a while before it has any effect on your system. Take it out and see if the problems continue.

If you go the Onyx route, be careful. That app is far more powerful than most people realise or give it credit for. Using it for basic maintenance will be fine but don't try to do too much extra with it until you feel confident with OSX. Hopefully that didn't come across as patronising.