[iBook] Problem Maybe Solved: IBook Freezes, Takes Many Re-Boots To Come Up

Fred Stevens K2FRD k2frd at mac.com
Fri Jan 27 09:38:11 PST 2006


After suffering through several more freezes, long repeated restarts, and HD CD checks which proved negative, I started looking at what else was new, software-wise that might be causing my problem. I had recently downloaded Cunning Fox which permitted me to not only watch my memory usage, it also has an application "kill" function which immediately turned off any selected running app which saved a lot of time if I wanted to quit or if a restart were necessary for software installation. As soon as I went back to the book method of quitting an application instead of using Cunning Fox, the freezes stopped. At least so far...

At 20:08 -0700 23/01/2006, Fred Stevens K2FRD wrote:
>Lately, my 14" iBook G3 900 (640 RAM; 40 GB HD) has taken to freezing/locking up: the mouse arrow won't move using either my Macally Optinet mouse nor the trackpad and nothing on the screen moves (if was moving at the time of freeze).  There doesn't seem to be any correlation between the application I'm using at the time of lock-up nor anything else. It seems to be doing this more frequently since I upgraded to 10.4.4, but it did it before. It does not respond to any keyboard commands except the forced Restart (command + control + power button). The screen always comes up with the apple and the little gear rotating endlessly, but just stays there. I'll wait a few minutes (sometimes a lot more than a few minutes), then do a force quit with the power button. After waiting the prerequisite ten seconds (or more), I'll press the power button to start it with the same results: apple and rotating gear. After I do this a number of times, something finally happens and it boots up normally. I've run DiskWarrior, Disk Utility, and the hardware check CD a few times, but that doesn't seem to solve anything and they come back with no trouble found. The ONLY good aspect of this situation is that sooner or later, it WILL power up, so I haven't reached the panic level. I don't know if it's relevant, but when it finally comes back up, the screen is exactly as I left it after I open the application which I was using at the time (but minus anything in RAM with which I was working, e.g., if I was reading an email when the computer froze, when I opened Eudora after finally getting the computer back up, the in-box would also open along with the message I was reading; if I was composing a message, it's gone).
>

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73 de Fred Stevens K2FRD, VO2FS
http://homepage.mac.com/k2frd/K2FRD.html


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