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Frequent (almost daily) system freezes.

S

Squareball

macrumors regular
Original poster
Mar 16, 2004
167
1
Palo Alto, CA
Hardware
12" iBook G4 1ghz 768mb ram, 40gig HD, airport extreme.

Almost daily now I'm having my system freeze up completely. The mouse still moves but everything is frozen and it does not unfreeze so I have to do a hard reset as I don't know any other way to unfreeze it.

A lot of times this seems to happen when I try to drag MP3s from a folder into iTunes. I drag them onto a playlist and bam.. everything freezes.. reboot time. After reboot, I do it again and the MP3s load in and play just fine. :(

It doesn't only happen when I do this but most of the time it locks like that it's when I drag files into iTunes. Other times it's just random but seems to be when I have a lot of stuff going on. I do a lot of graphic work and web development / java programming so I'll often have a lot of stuff going at once but my gosh Windows didn't lock this often on me!

3 times I have gotten the black screen of death. This is a weird thing that happens.. out of nowhere my screen dims and a black box comes up and says "You'll need to restart your computer now" and it says it in like 10 languages.

This is also NOT my first iBook and although iTunes never did this on my G3 iBook, I did have lockups and the black screen of death a number of times though which is why I sold it and got the G4 ibook.

I'm really upset now because I love the mac so much but my god why all these lockups? Is there something I can do here?

Another app that seems to be tied to lockups is LimeWire. I only run LimeWire once in a while for that '90s music nostalgia fix yet it seems that it's way more prone to lockup when LimeWire is running.

I guessed that this might be a hard drive issue but I ran some disk checking software and it told me nothing was wrong.

Help! :)

I so wanna get a G5 iMac but I just don't know that I can justify it if it'll do the same stuff the iBook is doing. That and I really like having a portable computer even if right now I use it mostly on my desk.

Also Java apps have run better since the last java update but still jEdit and Eclipse run kinda sluggish compared to Windows and Linux and Tomcat crashes daily on me....

A co-worker told me that at his friend's mac never has these kinds of problems. Just don't know what to do.

Thanks for any help.
 
is your ipod plugged in? i once got six kernel panics in the space of 10 minutes because my ipod's hard drive was corrupt. try running disk utility and verifying and repairing your ipod. if that doesnt help then im afraid i have no idea what the problem might be. good luck :)
 
Thank you both for your help. I will try the stuff in that link. I had done the repair permissions but I had never booted from the install CD and done all that. I hope this fixes it! :)
 
this happened to me as well. I'd repair permissions and all the normal routine things you can do. But that being said, I'm guessing you have a corrupt file in one of your mp3 folders or something... I had songs disappering out of my library, but they remained in the folders inside the itunes library folder. When I tried added them manually my system would always freeze up around "D". Hasn't happened in a while, but I haven't tried it in a while.
 
Squareball said:
A co-worker told me that at his friend's mac never has these kinds of problems. Just don't know what to do.

Thanks for any help.
Click to expand...

Have you recently installed some software since all this started happening? How much do you tweak your computer and add all kinds of small software programs, etc.?

I have had my iMac one year and never had to do a hard restart! never! I have had many programs unexpedly quit but I just click the program again and keep running! My wife's iBook has never needed a restart (G4 Too!) in four months!

It has to be some software you are running or installing.

Do you have Norton on your computer?
 
I just had another black screen of death telling me to shut down my computer. argh!

No, I don't have norton installled. I have so much software installed it's hard to say what may be causing it.

How do I boot from my iBook restore CDs so I can run the hard drive repair thing from the Panther installer? Do I have to hold down any keys when it's booting with the CD in?
 
Squareball said:
No, I don't have norton installled. I have so much software installed it's hard to say what may be causing it.
Click to expand...

Think back to the day/week you were starting to see all these screens of death and then think about what programs you installed about that time. If you can't remember because you installed so many then I would say you have been installing too many. :)

Good luck, instructions on the install, etc should be on the CD on how to boot up, etc.
 
Thanks for the tips. I'll give my machine a good overhaul tonight and try all of these tips and see if I don't get more stability
 
God I feel dumb now.
I just realized after reading one of the links you all posted for me that I had indeed installed some haxies to mod the GUI! These problems I have so often are rare but happened on both my old G3 and my new G4.. the common thing between them.. these haxies! So I have removed them and I'll see how it goes. If I still have problems I will make sure they are all gone by formatting and reinstalling Panther and not installing any crazy haxies!!!!! Can't believe I overlooked this
 
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