OS X Dies

[mcmike100]

A few times lately I've left my Powerbook on and come back a few hours later to find it pretty much frozen. The clock is always frozen at an earlier time (when it died, I suppose), and everything moves really slowly then dies completely. By the time I get back, I sometimes am able to save a document or two that I have open, but often the mouse cursor changes to the in-progress thing indefinitely. Also, when it's in this state, I'm never able to open new programs - I click and the icon keeps bouncing without opening.

I think I've been downloading torrents with Bits on Wheels each of the times this has happened, but that might just be a coincidence.

I thought it might be that it ran out of memory, but each time I've had gigs of free disk space, so it should have been able to use that, right?

This has happened two or three times in the last week. Any ideas?

By the way, each time this has happened I've probably had a lot of programs open, but the OS only dies after I leave my computer unattended for a few hours.

Thanks

 

[gekko513]

By the sound of it, it's hard drive related. You could try running fsck and see if it finds and are able to fix errors on your hard drive. Instructions for fsck here under the headline "Use fsck".

On second thought, the Bits on Wheels thing is probably more important. Try another torrent client? Keep Activity Monitor open to see how much resources Bits on Wheels uses and how much RAM is used in general?

 

[mad jew]

I agree. Ditch the torrent client and see how things go.

 

[mcmike100]

Ok, thanks - I'll try that. Any recommendations for a torrent program that takes up as few system resources as possible?

Thanks

 

[Bobdude161]

I use Azureus, i love it but it's a resource hogger. try transmission, very simple, very efficient

 

[iBookG4user]

I use tomato torrent. It is very light on memory (it's using 4MB ram right now while downloading a torrent). http://sarwat.net/bittorrent/

 

[FocusAndEarnIt]

I use Bits On Wheels, great torrent downloader. And no, I'm not using it for illegal pirating, these torrents are legal.

 

[Aperture]

Try Transmission. Also, I don't use it for Pirated Software, only legal downloads.

Kevin

 

[chrismccorkle]

either bittorrent or azureus.

i HATE azureus. it's crap. crap gui.
i chose bittorrent.

transmission is still favorite though

 

[mcmike100]

Thanks, I downloaded Transmission and Tomato Torrent.

 

[mad jew]

So have the problems cleared up then?

 

[apple_iBoy]

maybe iPod?

I used to have a similar problem (system not responding, clock frozen) when my iPod was plugged in through its dock. I finally ended up throwing out the glitchy dock and just directly plugging in the iPod, and the problem went away. I had a firewire cable go bad once and cause similar problems

Could it be a peripheral or a peripheral cable in your case?

 

[mcmike100]

Thanks, it hasn't died so far!