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"It Just Works" - My Ass It Does

N

No1451

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 20, 2008
474
0
Ottawa, ON
I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong, but my Mac(had it since October) has got to be the most unstable machine I have owned in a long time. What can I do to help identify the cause of my near constant app-crashes?

*Note that I am not looking for a fix, I am looking for assistance finding the cause*

The affected apps:

Open Office
VLC
Mail
Firefox
Safari

The general trend is app-wide crashes, with it just locking up solid then sitting on "Application is not responding". These are fairly frequent and the apps are listed in descending order, based on frequency of the lockups. None of the apps are beta releases and all are kept up to date.

Any ideas what I can do to figure this out?(where are crash logs kept?)
 
Also got my first mac in October and I haven't had a single crash. I haven't even had to force quit a program. Everything just works. For me at least. :(
 
Have you installed any ram? I had a problem with some bad ram that caused constant crashes. Other than that my OSX macs have been completely stable.
 
It's as untouched as the day I got it, I haven't even cracked her open aside from removing the hdd panel to re-orient it so it wasn't misaligned.

I thought about bad ram being a culprit but it is mostly these specific applications that crash on me. Skype is rock solid, MS Office is working perfectly, as is Transmission/iTunes/Colloquy.

So I really have no idea what's going on here.:(
 
Probably a plugin such as Growl or SIMBL. I've had problems with SIMBL in the past, so I'd start with that if you've got it installed.

Next time the crash happens, run "syslog | tail" in the terminal (Terminal.App) as fast as you can and send us the output.

Since only some applications are affected, it appears to be a software issue, not a hardware issue. One sure fix would be to reinstall Leopard, but I'm assuming you don't want to do that.
 
Create a new user and login as that user and see if the problem occurs under the new user account.

Also run hardware diagnostics as mentioned earlier.

Are you keeping it up to date with system updates?

Dare I say, have you tried repairing permissions?
 
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