Mac crash/screen of death?

[glygly]

Well just now,while I was browsing with firefox my mac (2.2gz MBP + os 10.4.9) crashed and a a greyish translucent screen came running down from the top of the screen, once it reached the bottom I got a message prompting me to reboot the machine by holding down the power button. Anyone know what this error is called? I'm a mac noob, so I wouldn't really know if there's a name for this crash already. Any help would be appreciated.

Thnks

 

[Lesser Evets]

I've never learned the term for the crash error either, but it used to happen a LOT on my MDD Mac Pro when I had disk errors. You might want to open your disk utility and repair permissions, repair disks, etc. Just in case.

It never really happened much except when my drives began to decay.

 

[kwood]

Kernel Panic.

 

[glygly]

Sigh. thanks for the help guys...I'm having more problems with this mac than I've ever had with a pc..Not a good showing for a mac convert. Cheers

 

[dpaanlka]

Kernel Panics rarely happen unless there is some sort of physical hardware defect or failure going on.

Also, why jump to Firefox so fast? It's not like the Mac's default browser, Safari, is evil like Internet Explorer.

Also, try running software update. We've been at 10.4.10 for a while now. You can also try repairing permissions using Disk Utility, found in Applications -> Utilities.

 

[Lesser Evets]

The biggest problem I ever had with modern Macs (those using OSX) has been hardware malfunction, most notably DRIVE FAILURE. Chances are that is what will give you the serious problems that come on slow, and annoying, then just trash everything. Look to the drive.

 

[IJ Reilly]

The key is frequency. If it's a one-off occurrence, don't worry. If it happens more often than a few times in a year, or it's reproducible, then you need to find the cause. As has already been mentioned, more often than not, it's a hardware issue, and more of than not, the hardware issue is faulty RAM.