Complete System Freeze/ Older Mac

[SummerBreeze]

I've had my PowerBook for a few years (1.5ghz G4/ Tiger/ 512RAM/ 15gb fee hdd space on 80gb hdd), and I've never really had a problem with it besides the occasional beach ball of death. However, in the past week I have had two complete system freezes. What I mean by this is that the cursor stays stationary, the computer won't sleep when I close it, and I have to force it to shut down by holding the power button. This happens at strange times (last time I just had Safari and a couple finder windows open, before it was Word and iTunes).

What I'm wondering is, is this a problem to be worried about? I haven't had crashes like these since system 9, so it kind of perturbs me to be having them now. I'm hoping they're related to my ridiculously small amount of RAM, but I would hate to upgrade the RAM just to find out that my logic board is going or something like that.

 

[mad jew]

What were you doing at the time of the freezes? It's pretty rare for a lack of RAM (as opposed to a rack of lamb) to freeze a machine. Usually a small amount of RAM will make your Mac run slowly, but still operate.

It'll be difficult to troubleshoot since it's relatively uncommon. However, try booting into Safe Mode as it disables some aspects of your machine and can help rule them out if you get another freeze. Also, check Console in the Utilities folder to see if anything was picked up in the crash logs. If you're still not getting anywhere, then check out Activity Monitor to see if a certain process is using a lot of your resources or is red (hanging). Make sure you look at All Processes, and not just the default My Processes.