My macbook goes evil

[zeemeerman2]

What's wrong with my MacBook? I got it from mid 2008, and now it slowly breaks down everything.

- WiFi cannot be accessed (it searches and searches but don't find my home WiFi network)
- Applications can't be opened (They bounce in the dock and then go back to their quitted state, standing still in the dock, without the little blue orb.)
- Can't empty the Trash, it just don't do anything when I command it to empty the Trash.

That happened all just a few minutes ago. Half an hour ago, everything was still perfect. I restarted it and now it's okay again.

But the day before yesterday, when I woke my MacBook up from sleep, the brightness of my screen didn't get on again. It was hard to see, but the display was on, only not the lights behind it. Okay, back to sleep and get up again, hoping it got better.
Now it didn't display anything, as it was still in standby.

Hard reset, all works again.

An application named MS Word froze my whole computer by clicking on the Text color option menu. No, not froze. Just delay everything I do with a solid five minutes, making working impossible.

Hard reset again, all works again.

What's wrong with my computer?

A month ago, nothing was wrong.


Oh, yeah, while typing this, I thought there was a piece of dust on my spotlight icon. It wasn't, there was a black dot that... watch yourself:

That's the first time in two years I see that happening.

Any help?

 

[GGJstudios]

Oh, yeah, while typing this, I thought there was a piece of dust on my spotlight icon. It wasn't, there was a black dot that... watch yourself:

That's the first time in two years I see that happening.

The dot in the icon means Spotlight is indexing, which will use system resources, slowing other things down.

 

[zeemeerman2]

That's one thing. But it can't keep my computer from waking up, disallow me from finding a WiFi access point, or any other thing I just summed up?

Then again, why does it need to index right now? It never has in the two years I got this laptop.

 

[GGJstudios]

That's one thing. But it can't keep my computer from waking up, disallow me from finding a WiFi access point, or any other thing I just summed up?

Then again, why does it need to index right now? It never has in the two years I got this laptop.

You might try repairing permissions.
You can't empty the Trash or move a file to the Trash

 

[chadua]

You might also be having a problem with your power supply.
Although I don't think any of the problems you are having could be related to the PRAM it might be worth a shot to try resetting it http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1379
The non responsive apps sounds like a hard drive problem, but that could be from a bad drive or from the power supply going bad.

If you make a new user account does the new user still have problems?

 

[GGJstudios]

Although I don't think any of the problems you are having could be related to the PRAM

You're right; it has nothing to do with PRAM:

From: Resetting your Mac's PRAM and NVRAM

Contents of PRAM
Some Macintosh computers may not have all the settings described below. For Mac OS X information, refer to Mac OS X: What's Stored in PRAM?

• Status of AppleTalk
• Serial Port Configuration and Port definition
• Alarm clock setting
• Application font
• Serial printer location
• Autokey rate
• Autokey delay
• Speaker volume
• Attention (beep) sound
• Double-click time
• Caret blink time (insertion point rate)
• Mouse scaling (mouse speed)
• Startup disk
• Menu blink count
• Monitor depth
• 32-bit addressing
• Virtual memory
• RAM disk
• Disk cache