My Constantly Crashing Mac (help)

My Mac OS keeps crashing, constantly. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. It likes to show the "You must press the power buttons and reset," error.

I did some searching and I found out that it's called a Kernel Panic. I found something called panic.log; the latest panic log is below, all of them are the same!

I've only had my mac since the end of March (this year), and it has worked fine up till a month a go. Now it's been crashing for no reason at all. Sometimes it stays on for awhile, and other times it does not -- I boot up and 15 seconds later it crashes.

My panic log is huge, but all of the entries are the same -- and all of them say airport in them. I've turned off my airport for now, but I use it a lot for net access. I'm going to have to turn it on to post this -- meanwhile, I'll be praying it works. It usually does, but recently it stops working. If I leave my computer for a hour or so and turn it works fine for a while -- maybe an hour -- then it crashes. If I turn off and then on, it works for about 15 seconds and then crashes. Unless I turn off the airport card.

The card never gave me problems before.

But there is one thing I noticed -- my problems came after I got the new 10.3.4 update. After that I've been having crashes all the time. I installed the airport card a week after I bought the my mac at the store. I also bought some extra RAM.

I have a 15" powerbook (G4, 1Ghz).

Again, no problems until about a month ago. And after I got the new updates (which included airport updates). Is there a way to fix this?

thanks, nate

(I'm not techy, but I think it's the software update for the airport card and/or the airport card. Can anyone help?)

----------------------------------------------

Fri Jul 2 22:11:50 2004


panic(cpu 0): Uncorrectable machine check: pc = 000000000041C5D4, msr = 0000000000149030, dsisr = 40000000, dar = 000000001C146008
AsyncSrc = 0000000000000000, CoreFIR = 0000000000000000
L2FIR = 0000000000000000, BusFir = 0000000000000000

Latest stack backtrace for cpu 0:
Backtrace:
0x0008391C 0x00083E00 0x0001EDA4 0x00091834 0x00090B20 0x0009426C
Proceeding back via exception chain:
Exception state (sv=0x2D001500)
PC=0x0041C5D4; MSR=0x00149030; DAR=0x1C146008; DSISR=0x40000000; LR=0x0042E6E4; R1=0x11F4BD30; XCP=0x00000008 (0x200 - Machine check)
Backtrace:
0x00000000 0x0042E6E4 0x00265CDC 0x00264BBC 0x00264B20
Kernel loadable modules in backtrace (with dependencies):
com.apple.iokit.AppleAirPort2(3.4.2)@0x3ed000
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOPCIFamily(1.4)@0x394000
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IONetworkingFamily(1.4.0)@0x3d0000
Exception state (sv=0x1F9E9780)
PC=0x00000000; MSR=0x0000D030; DAR=0x00000000; DSISR=0x00000000; LR=0x00000000; R1=0x00000000; XCP=0x00000000 (Unknown)

Kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 7.4.0:
Wed May 12 16:58:24 PDT 2004; root:xnu/xnu-517.7.7.obj~7/RELEASE_PPC

 

I took out the card, and my powerbook worked fine. I used the computer for almost an hour without any problems.

Then I put the airport card back into the slot, and now it seems to be working fine.

Maybe that was it -- the airport card getting lose. I can see it happening, since I have a laptop.

Thanks for the suggestions. Now lets see if it will continue to work.

--nate