MacBook Pro Crashing and Freezing

[Jay42]

A friend of mine has a relatively new Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro (15 inch) running the latest version of Tiger. He says that Eudora, Word, Powerpoint and a few other programs crash somewhat frequently while he's working on the machine. Eventually, he says the entire system will freeze and lock up. He can't even get to force quit and is forced to hold the power button to reboot the machine.

Since I don't have immediate access to his computer, I don't have a ton of details of the problem but I was wondering if someone had a quick fix or at least a suggestion as to what could be happening. I told him to repair permissions and reboot but it didn't help. Should he bring this machine back to Apple? Thanks.

 

[mad jew]

Could be a few things. Does he have third party RAM? Does he have at least 8GB of free hard drive space? If he opens Activity Monitor in the background and looks at All Processes, is anything looking out-of-the-ordinary? Are there any theme changers installed? Are there any third party peripherals installed?

 

[Jay42]

He has the stock 2gb of ram from Apple and plenty of free HD space. The computer is relatively un-tinkered with since it is primarily his work machine. Definitely no theme changing stuff. The only peripheral he connects, to my knowledge, besides ext. HDs, is a Palm handheld. Could that be doing it? I will have to look at the activity monitor when I get a chance, but I doubt I would find anything suspicious.

PS: I meant to put this in Mac Help...could someone move it please?

 

[yellow]

Crashlogs from the most offending apps would help.

 

[gollum]

I had what sounds like a very similar problem on my MacBook C2D.
Per a suggestion on another forum I tried this:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303319

My MacBook was locking up daily, now after over a week it has only done it once. I'm sure someone will chime in and say it can't possibly be a solution, but what do you have to lose, it seemed to work for me!

 

[yellow]

I'm sure someone will chime in and say it can't possibly be a solution, but what do you have to lose, it seemed to work for me!

Sure it could... especially if it's an overheating issue.