G5 1.6 starting to crash multiple applications

[mr1970]

Hi there

I bought my son a secondhand G5 1.6 recently, and it's worked perfectly well for about 2 months (running Tiger, incidentally). Recently, however, all the standard apps he uses (Safari, iTunes, Word, GarageBand etc) have started to unexpectedly crash - spinning beach ball followed by either eventually closing down or having to Force Quit.

There's plenty of space on the hard drive, and I've checked / repaired permissions, but I'm wondering if there's something else going on here before I reach for the rebuild disk - could this be the PRAM battery on its last legs?

Any thoughts welcome - I could just rebuild the disk but it's most of a day to do it including backup / restore so I'd rather not if that might not be the problem.

Many thanks in advance for any help.

mr1970

 

[zmttoxics]

This is more likely to be a ram / disk problem then anything else. I recommend tracking down a copy of techtool and memtest86 for mac so you can properly diagnose the machine.