[Ti] crashing around

[silvo conticello]

Hello everybody,

it is few days I'm getting the spin of death every few hours and I 
cannot understand why.
After 6-8 hours of use, I start getting the beachball spinning in one 
application, then as soon as I switch to another application the 
spinning starts also there, and so on untill the entire AlBook is a 
spinning beachball. At that point the only solution seemed to push the 
power button and force the shut down.

One of the symptoms that I hear in conjunction with this is a recursive 
noise in the left speaker (it might well be not connected to the 
speaker - I thought it might be the disk).
I see (menumeters) the CPU load varying, while, as soon as the symptoms 
start, it seems that there is no activity on the disk.
The last time it happened I found the computer with the screen off (I 
was awy for 15min) and the cooling fan working. I could not turn on the 
screen in any way, so I just shut the computer down.

At least once I succeed to restart the computer after the first 
application went spinning (actually if I don't switch to any other 
application the first beachball will disappear letting you get the 
shutdown dialog).

FSCK and Diskwarrior did not find any problem.

Could it be a problem with the disk? (@#$%@% I've a deadline in 1 week, 
and I cannot afford to lose the computer now)

Thanks
Silvo


Silvo Conticello
Albook 17" 1.5GHz/1.5Gb RAM/80Gb HD/OS10.3.9
iMac 1GHz/500Mb Ram/80Gb HD/OS10.4.1/17" display
Cambridge UK