Powermac G4 MDD - apps keep "unexpectedly quitting"

[QCassidy352]

My gf has a 1.25 Ghz powermac MDD. It's only a few months old. Stock 80 GB hard drive, 64 MB Radeon 9000 (stock), 1 GB RAM (from 3 different sources), 10.3.5.

Lately, all kinds of applications have been "unexpectedly quitting." First it was Warcraft 3 (I was playing ), then Excel, then IE and Safari, then AOL IM... so quite a few. This didn't used to happen, and it doesn't happen ALL the time now... but it happens often enough to be a REAL bother. I'd really appreciate some help figuring out what's going on here.

We've tried repairing permissions, btw. I'm wondering if it could be the RAM, since it's 256 from apple, 256 from microcenter, and 512 from crucial... maybe it's not all playing nice? But that's been in there from the beginning, and this is a recent problem. Also, bad RAM tends to cause kernal panics, not single app quitting, right?

Help, please.

 

[caveman_uk]

Try taking out all the RAM except the stuff that Apple supplied - your computer will now be quite a bit slower - but do the crashes stop? If they do try adding the RAM back a stick at a time to see what causes the crashes.

As you say bad RAM generally causes kernal panics not individual crashes but it's worth a go

 

[QCassidy352]

any thoughts besides the RAM? I ask because 1) it's been in there since the beginning and it's a recent problem, and 2) I've never really heard of RAM causing such problems... Though I'm sure it's possible.

 

[Blue Velvet]

There have been a number of reported problems with 10.3.5 & stability -- here & elsewhere. Could this be responsible?

I'm still on 10.3.4 at home & at work and won't go near 10.3.5 for either set-ups.

 

[decksnap]

Does it happen when you initiate a dialog box pop-up? like when you go to save or something?

 

[crazytom]

A lot of times, corrupt preference files will cause unexpected quits. They should be located in ./Library/Preferences. Try trashing those on the apps you're having problems with and see if that will help.

Though, it's odd that so many of your apps are doing this.

 

[Macmaniac]

You may want to try running a system utility like Norton to see if that works. The problems may be more then a basic utility can handle.

 

[QCassidy352]

A lot of times, corrupt preference files will cause unexpected quits. They should be located in ./Library/Preferences. Try trashing those on the apps you're having problems with and see if that will help.

Though, it's odd that so many of your apps are doing this.

yeah, I find it odd that it should be happening on so many apps at once. It sometimes happens when saving or things like that... but not always.

 

[decksnap]

When I had this problem with multiple apps, it was happening when pop-up dialogs were coming up. I decided it must have been an apple preference, not an app preference, so I trashed all my com.apple plists and it fixed the problem.