Crash and Burn

[saabmp3]

I'm having a very serious problem with my new powerbook. OS X is crashing, alot! This just started happening two days ago when I tried to install VirtualPC 5.0 for OSX. When I had that installed my computer was at it's worse point. My powerbook wouldn't wake up from sleep at all and required 4 restarts (compared to only 6 in it's lifetime total). I dumped VirtualPC and all of it's residual files that I could find and connectix's website told me about. The comptuer was however, still running dog slow. My solution to this was to pop the OSX install CD in the drive and just do a reinstall of the system files. I let it do it's thing and things seemed to be dandy today. When I came home tonight I decided to install all of the updates (to update the system from 10.1.4 to 10.1.5. Now things are running a tad bit slower, and my comptuer just crashed again. I think this time it was the finder crashing, but I just decided to restart to save time (it was taking 10+minutes). I'm not sure if this is related or not.
I really don't want to have to format my drive as I have 10GB's of MP3's on here which I can't backup and the only way to get them back is rip ALL of my CD's again (were talking like 120 CD's here). What other options do I have? Should I wait it out and see if it has improved itself? Should I reinstall OS 10.1.4 and just forget about the .1 update? I'm sorta in a quandry here.

BEN

 

[Rower_CPU]

You should have a hardware diagnotics CD that came with the machine.

I'd suggest running some tests to ascertain if there is a hardware issue, since you tried a format/reinstall on the drive.

 

[ooartist]

Hmmmm...

Can you here the fan running on it? If it get slow over time I suspect that your fan maybe bad. I had a laptop that did the same thing and it ended up being the fan. What's happening is the G4 processor is cooking itself and when they get HOT things seem to crawl to a halt.

 

[King Cobra]

Do you have Norton Utilities with you? If it's the latest version, run Antivirus and Disk Doctor and the basic Utilities. When was the last time you did a file system check? Startup in OS X and hold Apple-S. When the text ends, type in "fsck -y" (no quotes). If any errors pop up, do it again until no errors pop up.

Also, boot up, holding Apple-Option-O-F and type in "reset-all" when you can. This resets the Firmware. Zap your PRAM while you are at it.

Why would you back up 10GB of music on 120 CDs? You know, if you have an iPod you can transfer them all there and back again with Xpod. Or, if you have a second computer, you can transfer EVERYTHING on your computer to another (provided there is enough Hard Drive space) using Firewire Target Disk mode. If you have a spare ext. Hard Drive you could link that up and copy the info there.

 

[saabmp3]

Ok, well I borrowed my friend's FireWire HD and just backed up everything to it. Then I used the software reinstall CD's to do a complet format on this thing and I'm starting from scratch. I don't think my fan is the problem but I'm about ready to run the hardware tests to see for sure.

BEN

PS I made the 120 CD comment cause I ripped all of the MP3's

 

[cb911]

you should check out Apple's Knowledge Base. there should be something there that will help you.