Freezing system?

[Strudel]

So this is weird, I purchased my macbook (spec's unknown because I bought it from the school and they said they'd "customize it" for me.) It's been a coupla years (about 6) since I last properly used a mac and I forget to find out where we see the information such as graphics drivers and the speed of the hard drives and ram.

So question 1) where do I find said information.

Question 2) My macbook now freezes on average 3-4 times on average. What this means is all the programs stop, itunes freezes the song, the mouse still moves, cmd+tab stops working, expose stops working, the dock stops showing (i've set it on autohide), and it just acts like that for a few minutes then it decides to be a good boy again. Could this be a virus? What's the deal? Even starting up though, it acts oddly. Like it'll take a long time to initialize osx sometimes, or when choosing a user account, the computer will stop freeze briefly then load up the password slot. When entering the password slot and hitting enter or hte button manually, it will act as if it didnt' detect it for about 30 seconds to a minute then it will suddenly log in (during this freeze period the password field is unalterable).

During all instances of frozen sessions, the mouse is still fully mobile and 90 percent of the time the spinning rainbow wheel of patience does not appear until about 3 seconds before it's going to start back up again (meaning hte cursor stays that little arrow).

Thanks again!

 

[mad jew]

There's some information about your machine in System Profiler, which is in the Utilities folder. You might want to combine this with MacTracker to get the best and most specific results.

The freezing is a little more difficult to fix. As a start, I'd use the OSX discs to completely reformat the drive and reinstall OSX since the machine is effectively second hand.

 

[Strudel]

The problem is, if i reset, I have to backup about 50 gigs worth of crap to a hard drive ( I don't have an external NEAR that large). Also, it's firsthand.. it's just the school has a special deal with apple distributors in china so they act as a middleman. Also our school has a buncha settings and mandatory programs that they install. Meaning if I reformat all that ***** is lost too and it costs me 300 dollars cuz they're too stupid to buy a site license.

 

[mad jew]

Okay, I misunderstood your first post and thought the machine was new for you. Whatever happens next, you should immediately back everything up just in case you get a hardware failure anyway. It's always good to have everything backed up.

Tell us more about this customised software your school put on the system. Your freezing could have something to do with that. What third party hardware and software does your Mac have?