Programs crashing a lot?

[AreYouIn?]

I've been experiencing programs crashing a lot. Firefox when I'm trying to load a video on hulu or networks website. Usually if I have another tab open at the same time. It just did it with 1 other tab open only so its not like it is an excessive amount of tabs open.

Microsoft word crashed on my in the middle of studying for an exam this morning. I was trying to paste a large amount of text and it just crashed. I know that could just be microsoft crap but it happens in other programs as well.

Occasionally, especially during finals, I will have multiple ppt and word/pages files open along with multiple tabs in firefox and pdf files.

Here are my macbooks specs:
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache (per processor): 4 MB
Memory: 1 GB
Bus Speed: 667 MHz
Boot ROM Version: MB21.00A5.B07
SMC Version: 1.17f0

Running Tiger still!

160 gb harddrive that still has plenty of room left on it.

Could I be experiencing these crashes because my macbook is 3 years old or something?

 

[MrCheeto]

3-years is old? You're looking at about 1-year in Apple years

Trust me, these things don't go stale like that. *looks over at 2002 iBook*

This sounds like bad memory, bad hard drive, or Tiger is being a turd.

Get Snow Leopard. It will allow for more modern software, thus recent bug fixes.

How full is your hard drive? If you have less than 10gb of free space, you URGENTLY need to delete some files to make room or get a larger drive. Check how much you have by going to Finder and clicking once on your hard drive icon, in the sidebar. Type Command+I. It will tell you your hard drive's capacity and the amount available.

 

[AreYouIn?]

My hard drive crashed last year. I turned it on and had the folder with a ?. I replaced it with a 160gb hard drive which still has more than 100gb left on it since I lost most of my files when my 120gb one crashed. As for snow leopard can you install it on top of tiger? In all honesty I am probably going to buy a 13inch macbook pro soon. Next year is my senior year of college and I think I will need a new computer for graduate school after that. Or I'm just using it as an excuse to buy a new toy.

 

[MrCheeto]

Besides the graphics card, this machine should have more years on it. The sluggish graphics will make difficult rendering large images and such.

Upgrading the ram to 2gb and installing Snow Leopard on top of Tiger seems to be a way to modernize it. I added another gig and installed a copy of Snow Leopard over Tiger on a client's MacBook (2006 model) and it FLEW after the upgrade!

Replacing the ram will also eliminate the problems if it is caused by the ram

 

[AreYouIn?]

I'll try that then. I'm probably going to give it to my parents as the only computer they have is a crappy acer that takes 30 minutes to start up. If I do the upgrades I'm sure they can make it last for years!

 

[MrCheeto]

For sure! A client just left here with a 2002 iBook that she's been using for college, talk about longevity!

 

[AreYouIn?]

I can see this one lasting much longer. It has had 979 loadcycles on the battery and is only at 94% health. The only thing really wrong with it other than the lagging is the palmrest cracking. Since its the only computer I have I can't take it in for repair. Plus the closest apple store is 2 hours away!