Help! Program failures and freezing on a MacBook.

Hey everyone,

I'm having some really irritating problems with my MacBook (running Tiger) as of late. I've been trying to use MacScan and ClamXav to see if they'd solve the problems, but so far, no dice.

What's been happening (as of yesterday and today) is that my Mac Messenger will open, start to login, and RIGHT before it actually signs me in, the program shuts down. Today, my iTunes started to do the same thing.

For the past maybe week and a half to two weeks, it's been doing something weird - Safari would freeze, then everything would freeze, forcing me to manually shut down and restart my laptop. Once I did, everything worked normally and fine for awhile until the same thing would happen again. No programs were acting weird, it would just freeze and I'd have to shut down. Now, however, MSN and iTunes won't run properly and it's driving me mental.

I tried repairing permissions - but to no avail. It gets to a certain point and then the Disk Utility freezes and I have to shut down and restart.

This is driving me absolutely MENTAL. I'm about ready to throw a $2000 laptop against the wall and then beat it to smithereens with a baseball bat, haha. Any help would be very much appreciated! I really don't wanna lose all my files (I'm a college kid, so needless to say, I don't wanna go through the hassle of losing all my notes and such), so any advice short of having to resort to that is what I'm hoping for. But if it's absolutely necessary, I guess I'll have no choice.

Thanks guys, I really hope one of you pros can help me out!

 

Hey guys,

Thanks for the quick replies!

1) Yep, I've tried repairing permissions through Disk Utility, but it gets to a certain point, freezes, and then freezes my laptop completely to the point where I have to manually shut it off and reboot!

2) I've got 71.01 GB left available.

I'm still under Apple Care - would it be best to take it into my local Mac-friendly computer shop? I have a feeling all they'd do is wipe my hard drive clean, which I'm really trying to avoid. I don't know what else to do though, this is beyond frustrating.

Whenever I run MacScan, it'll delete tracking cookies, which I presume is a normal/good thing. When I run ClamXav, it'll go through its whole scanning process and finish, saying there was nothing bad found. So I just don't know what's causing all of these problems, especially when the other day all it was doing was freezing, but no programs were harmed. I know my way around them, but I'm not all THAT computer savvy, so this is just confusing & annoying lol.

 

Thanks a lot Flopticalcube, I guess that's what I'll have to do.

Quick question, though - if I back up all my files to an external drive and put them on the new hard drive, will that cause any problems? Maybe I'm scarred from being an ex-Windows user lol. It shouldn't transfer over any bugs or viruses, should it?

And to pick your brain a little more (sorry for all the questions!), do you know any tricks for how to then get all my music from my iPhone back onto the new hard drive?

Thanks so much! Sorry for all the questions, they probably seem ridiculous to those of you who actually know all about this stuff haha.