MacBook Crash Issues, Possible RAM Problem?

[Crazy Maxwell]

I recently received a black MacBook for my birthday. It was purchased from someone who purchased it in April, and I'm under the impression that it was not defective when purchased and that if there is a defect, it is not in the hardware.

When I got it, I formatted it and transferred all of my programs and stuff over from my old iBook G4. It worked alright for a little while, then began apparently locking up. When it locks up, any programs I click will bounce indefinitely and not open. Anything I attempt to force quit usually hangs, and if I force quit something and it does appear to close, the dock still says it's open. It seems as though something's tying up all of the system's RAM.

Thinking that maybe some non-universal binary programs had been brought over from my old machine, I did another install of OS X over the first one, this time an archive install, and had all of the basic applications (Safari, etc.) replaced with things I know are universal binary. It's seemed to have less problems since, but it just crashed a moment ago for unknown reasons.

I haven't been able to identify a particular program that's causing this, although I'm fairly sure the few programs I'm running right now are "clean". One of the suspects appears to be Mail, which seems unlikely considering that I'm fairly sure this install replaced it, too.

Have any of you seen or heard of a problem similar to this? Do any of you have any idea what could be/is causing this, and what could be done about it? I've still got a good warranty, so I'm not too worried about that, I just wanted to be sure I couldn't remedy the problem myself before I went through the trouble of bringing it in and basically wasted someone's time

Thanks in advance.

 

[ebouwman]

i've heard of a sort of similar situation where somebody went on one of the computers at my school (mac mini) and told all the apps in the dock to "open on startup" and then some more apps that weren't in the dock.

I don't think this is the problem you have though

When the person that bought it for you got it, was it used?
And if so do you still have all the ram that is normally on that computer, or did somebody take some of your ram before selling the MacBook to you?

If you reformatted the drive there shouldn't be anything on there that wasn't on your old computer, so thats why i think the thing thats tieing up the ram is another computer(where YOUR ram is)

 

[Crazy Maxwell]

i've heard of a sort of similar situation where somebody went on one of the computers at my school (mac mini) and told all the apps in the dock to "open on startup" and then some more apps that weren't in the dock.

I don't think this is the problem you have though

When the person that bought it for you got it, was it used?
And if so do you still have all the ram that is normally on that computer, or did somebody take some of your ram before selling the MacBook to you?

If you reformatted the drive there shouldn't be anything on there that wasn't on your old computer, so thats why i think the thing thats tieing up the ram is another computer(where YOUR ram is)

No, the original buyer bought it brand-new in April and messed with it barely at all before just letting it sit in the box. The thing was in absolutely mint condition when I got it. As far as I know, they didn't take anything out of it, and it has all of its RAM.

 

[ebouwman]

Are you connecting to a remote server?

I know that when i connect to my schools server with my MacBook and then i turn airport off, severing the connection my computer will lock up for a little while before it decides that it can't reconnect to the server.

This can also happen when connecting to a server set up on another mac if the connection is temporarily interupted.