Mac Pro Crashing Constantly in FCP, PS, everything else

[brokencrayon]

Hey, I have a 3 GHz 8-core Mac Pro that is about 2 years old, and it seems to get the beachball and forcing a manual shutdown 2-3 times a day. Usually what happens is I am in Final Cut Pro (doesn't really matter WHAT I am doing in it), then I will get the spinning beach ball, can't quit it, 'force quit' menu says it is not responding, so I force quit it. That doesn't work, it's still active in the dock, and if I try to shut down from the menu, everything clears from the desktop like it's about to shut down, but it never does, so I have to shut it down manually. This isn't limited to FCP, it happens in Photoshop, Motion, Finder, Fetch, TM backups etc.

I'm on latest Leopard, Using FCP 7 (did it in 6 too), and I have put in a brand new harddrive and did a clean reinstall of the OS and software, worked fine for a bit, then hit the problem again. I have 9 gigs of RAM, 1 from Apple, 8 from Crucial and the ATI Radeon X1900 XT.

Any suggestions/ideas would be much appreciated!

-sam

 

[charlesbronsen]

First thing that comes to mind would be RAM. Might have a bad stick as that would sure cause all the lockups.

 

[agentphish]

I know it's a new drive, but check your hard disk's smart status...
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/23777
That is a link to smartCTL which runs up in the menu bar and if you click on it's icon you will get detailed information about the health of your drive.

Also, do you use limewire or anything like that? You COULD have directory damage.

Overall though, the most likely culprit is RAM.

 

[brokencrayon]

Thanks guys, figured it would probably be the RAM... took out the first batch of Crucial that I got when I first got the computer, gonna see if that makes it better...