two freezes, sign of trouble?

[jackc]

I've had my system completely freeze up on me twice in the last week or so, the first time it's ever happened. I'm on an ancient 12" PB, 1.33 GHz G4, running 10.4.10.

I didn't do anything to cause it that I know of, the last one it was frozen after just sitting there overnight so I really don't know what could have happened there. I ran Disk Warrior on it and the disk checked out fine. I'm now back up running.

Without knowing anything else about my system, do you think this is necessarily an impending sign of doom? Any suggestions on what to do (I've backed up my data of course)? Should I reinstall?

 

[IJ Reilly]

Can you describe the symptoms more completely?

 

[jackc]

Well I don't really have any useful info, the first time I believe it was right after I plugged in my external monitor, that time it froze up, just wouldn't respond to anything and when I tried to restart it gave me a warning message that I need to power down (or something to that effect). I don't see why the monitor would cause it, and I've used it since. So I chalked it up to Acts of God and ran Disk Warrior on it to check.

The next time I didn't get the warning message it just completely froze up, like I said I wasn't even doing anything it was just sitting there after using it without problems.

I don't expect anyone to be able to diagnose the problem, but maybe you've had a similar experience or have some advice.

I can't think of anything I might be doing differently, I starting using Jungle Disk recently for backups, but it seemed to work without a hitch when I first started using it.

 

[IJ Reilly]

Sounds like at least one of these episodes was a kernel panic. Did you see the screen with instructions to restart in several languages?

And when you say "freeze up" do you mean that the Mac became completely unresponsive, or you got the spinning beach ball?

 

[jackc]

Sounds like at least one of these episodes was a kernel panic. Did you see the screen with instructions to restart in several languages?

Yeah, that's what I saw the first time

And when you say "freeze up" do you mean that the Mac became completely unresponsive, or you got the spinning beach ball?

No beach ball, it was completely unresponsive.

Can pretty much anything cause a kernel panic, or does that give a clue to what might have happened?

 

[IJ Reilly]

Most of the time, hardware problems are the cause, and most of them are caused by bad RAM. You could post the contents of your panic log (spotlight panic.log), but generally this provides few clues. On a laptop you should also suspect impact issues, which can include RAM and Airport cards being jarred loose.