I've been using Macs for over 20 years now, but this is a new one on me:
I was given a hand-me-down PowerMac G5 from a colleague a few weeks ago, and it seemed to work fine. The IT guy upped the RAM to 4.5 gigs, and I was just getting ready to test those legendary fans with some serious computing, when, last night, I was asked by software update to update some stuff; I don't remember what, but since the computer is running an up-to-date version of Tiger, probably the new Safari and other stuff that has come out recently. I saw it through hitting the restart button, then ran off, not coming back until the next morning, it turns out. Getting back this morning, the computer was crashed and the fans were wailing away. On a forced restart, all seemed fine, until I launched Safari -- which crashed on launch, asking to tell Apple. I try Mail. Same thing. Quicktime, same thing; even Software update crashes! Yet all other apps seem to work fine: Firefox, Garageband, Mathematica; the only other app that seems to consistently crash is Adobe Acrobat, not surprisingly since it, in my experience, is the canary of apps.
What on earth is going on? I tried memtest to test the RAM, but seemed to see nothing; I tried swapping out the DIMMs, but to no effect. Why would it only affect Apple apps? Any ideas?
I was given a hand-me-down PowerMac G5 from a colleague a few weeks ago, and it seemed to work fine. The IT guy upped the RAM to 4.5 gigs, and I was just getting ready to test those legendary fans with some serious computing, when, last night, I was asked by software update to update some stuff; I don't remember what, but since the computer is running an up-to-date version of Tiger, probably the new Safari and other stuff that has come out recently. I saw it through hitting the restart button, then ran off, not coming back until the next morning, it turns out. Getting back this morning, the computer was crashed and the fans were wailing away. On a forced restart, all seemed fine, until I launched Safari -- which crashed on launch, asking to tell Apple. I try Mail. Same thing. Quicktime, same thing; even Software update crashes! Yet all other apps seem to work fine: Firefox, Garageband, Mathematica; the only other app that seems to consistently crash is Adobe Acrobat, not surprisingly since it, in my experience, is the canary of apps.
What on earth is going on? I tried memtest to test the RAM, but seemed to see nothing; I tried swapping out the DIMMs, but to no effect. Why would it only affect Apple apps? Any ideas?