First Mac: Lots of Crashes, Please Help!

[Argand]

This is my first Mac; I've had it for about two weeks. It's a new 2.8 24" with the standard 1GB stick and one added 2GB stick.

I'm shocked at how often things are crashing. I'm so shocked that I figure it must be something I'm doing or something with the machine. This is what's happened:

- WoW crash several times in one day (but never again)
- Finder has crashed on numerous occasions when inserting a USB drive
- iPhoto has crashed while importing pictures and simply opening it
- iTunes has crashed while opening an mp3
- Safari v2 crashed once (the screen went dark and told me I had to hold the power button to reboot)
- AppleScript crashed while trying to run a script

Edit: I ran the test tool that comes with AppleCare and everything passed. Also, when I say "crashed", I mean the spinning beachball. The program becomes unresponsive and I have to force quit it. When Finder crashes, I have no choice but to reboot because after the force quit I cannot get finder to load again.

I'm confused and seeking guidance, please help!

 

[thejadedmonkey]

1st off, macs tend to be very persnickety when it comes to dealing with 3rd party RAM, especially value priced ram.

2nd, the video card in that mac has... issues.

What you're describing (for the most part) doesn't appear to be video related, however. What I would do is pull the 2gig stick of RAM that you added yourself and see if the Apple works any better. You may notice a slowdown, but it shouldn't be very bad. On the upside, it should (hopefully) fix your problems.

 

[Butthead]

that's a lot of crashing. Seeing it's a new Core 2 Extreme chip in there, are the fans running like crazy when the crashing occurs? Just wondering, cause iMacs in the past have run really hot with the thin design, which may cause overheating or excessive crashing. You might have to take it back for replacement under warranty.

I was going to say you shouldn't be running OS9 on that machine (inside joke). By crashing (except for the Safari restart error message) do you mean an application 'unexpectedly quit', or you got a spinning beachball necessitating doing a option/command/esc key forced quit of the app, or have these 'crashes' required restarting the iMac? See, cause under OS9, when you had a crash of an application, you needed to restart the whole computer, which PO'd a lot of people- and now everyone says they've been running OSX for up to a year or so and never had to restart (lucky I guess, cause my internal modem on my Pismo will sometimes crash my system while attempting to make a internet connection, getting a dreaded grey screen message telling me to push the power button and restart ).

 

[Butthead]

1st off, macs tend to be very persnickety when it comes to dealing with 3rd party RAM, especially value priced ram.

2nd, the video card in that mac has... issues.

What you're describing (for the most part) doesn't appear to be video related, however. What I would do is pull the 2gig stick of RAM that you added yourself and see if the Apple works any better. You may notice a slowdown, but it shouldn't be very bad. On the upside, it should (hopefully) fix your problems.

Got a link to the video issues?

plugging in anything to the USB port, shouldn't be related to 3rd party RAM incompatibility issues, I wouldn't think???

yeah, pulling the extra RAM is a quick way to troubleshoot, could isolate the problem. If not, will still need to return it for warranty repair/replacment.

 

[thejadedmonkey]

Got a link to the video issues?

plugging in anything to the USB port, shouldn't be related to 3rd party RAM incompatibility issues, I wouldn't think???

yeah, pulling the extra RAM is a quick way to troubleshoot, could isolate the problem. If not, will still need to return it for warranty repair/replacment.

The link

Also, plugging in a USB drive will cause the OS to read from the hard drive, pull up a graphic, etc... which can cause paging. paging will cause data to move on the RAM, which if it's bad, will give you problems.

In my non-professional humble opinion, if it's not one of these two things, it's time to Call Apple, unless someone else had some other suggestions. I don't get that many crashes from my MBP and Mini in a month combined*.

*Unless I start surfing Myspace.com

 

[Argand]

Thank you for your responses. I understand that something must be going on and that the computer certainly should not act like this. I'm considering a reformat and reinstall as well (although that may not be as necessary as it was in the Windows world).

I edited my original post to add this information:
Edit: I ran the test tool that comes with AppleCare and everything passed. Also, when I say "crashed", I mean the spinning beachball. The program becomes unresponsive and I have to force quit it. When Finder crashes, I have no choice but to reboot because after the force quit I cannot get finder to load again.

 

[Jiddick ExRex]

Did you pull out your 2 GB stick????

It's likely to be the culprit!!

 

[Sun Baked]

Safari v2 crashed once (the screen went dark and told me I had to hold the power button to reboot)

That is a kernel panic, it will load what happened into

Macintosh HD/Library/Logs/panic.log

If you look at that, it'll likely be a RAM issue, that tends to cause the most issues on new upgraded Macs.