Troubleshoot Freeze

[Stevp1]

I've been having a freezing powerbook problem for a couple of weeks now. It seems to be random, although it has happened more while in Firefox than in anything else, but it has happened while in other apps. It is a complete freeze up, requiring a hard re-boot via the power button.

question is, is there a log file in console that might tell me what was happening at the freeze? I'm assuming if its frozen it can't write to a log file, but maybe there's a chance.

How else could I troubleshoot this? I haven't added or changed anything for a long while.

thanks all.

 

[mad jew]

I'd start the troubleshooting by looking at what you're doing at the time of the freezing (Firefox) and try using an equivilent for a while (Safari or whatever) to see if the problem still occurs. Console in the Utilities folder should show you all OSX can in terms of logs. The logs titled CrashReporter in each subsection may be a good place to start.

Do you have any third party hardware plugged in? Do you have third party RAM? Do you have plenty of free hard drive space available?

 

[nazmac21]

Open Activity Monitor and see what uses your RAM.

 

[Stevp1]

Looks like the culprit may be disk space. i'm down to 5.5 gig on my 80 gig internal. Not good.

Thanks guys.

 

[mad jew]

Ahh, excellent. Aim for over 8GB of free space, if possible.