[X4U] Mac Mini's prone to kernal panics?

[Randy B.Singer]

Richard Gilmore said:

>I have a friend with a PPC Mac Mini with 512 of RAM and Tiger. He was
>getting constant kernal panics so I reinstalled the system and it is better
>but he still gets them occasionally are the Mini¹s prone to them?


*No* Macintosh running OS X is prone to kernel panics.  If you see more 
than one or two kernel panics per year you should consider that highly 
unusual.  (I've *never* seen a kernel panic on one of my personal Macs.  
And I've been using various versions of OS X on several Macs, everyday 
for 5 years.)

Kernel panics are usually (but not always) caused by a hardware problem.  
Most commonly it is out-of-spec third party RAM, or a bad USB hub, using 
an iSight with other peripherals, or a problematic PCI card (obviously 
not a problem with a Mac mini).  But the problem can be caused by just 
about any peripheral, or by having too many peripherals attached to one 
bus.

The thing to do is to return the mini to an out-of-box state, with no 
third-party hardware attached/installed, make sure that there are no 
software problems (run Disk Utility/Repair Disk or Disk Warrior, and 
maybe do an archive and install of the OS to be sure that it is pristine) 
and see if the problem goes away.  If it doesn't, your Mac needs to go 
back to Apple for repair.  More than likely it will be fine.  You can 
then add things to it one at a time to see which causes that problem.



Randy B. Singer
Co-Author of: The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th and 6th editions)

Routine OS X Maintenance and Generic Troubleshooting
http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html