For the love of god help!!!

greggwsmithgreggwsmith
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
My 15inch Powerbook suddenly started freezing up today. Now randomly it gives me a black square telling me to restart my machine. Also sometimes when i restart I get a bunch of scrolling black and white text. I am still a newbie so I don't know what to do. I have a lot of info on this machine. Help? Also is there a progam that helps clean up my hard drive and recover some space?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 2
    ghost_user_nameghost_user_name Posts: 22,667member
    Black square... is this what you're seeing?







    This is a kernel panic. A kernel panic is a total, irrecoverable system crash from which you have to restart. That's how it looks in 10.3. It's slightly different under 10.2.



    A kernel panic is usually either a hardware issue, a very unusual driver conflict, or some other low-level problem. The most frequent cause of kernel panics these days seems to be bad RAM. I would suggest pulling out any third-party RAM that was added after you purchased the machine and see if that helps.



    Also, do you have any other third-party hardware you use regularly with this machine? Do these panics occur when this hardware is connected or in use?



    Have you installed Norton Utilities? Norton is notoriously infamous for causing a variety of problems on Mac OS X including kernel panics.
  • Reply 2 of 2
    gardenofearthlydelightsgardenofearthlydelights Posts: 963member
    Man, you seem to get the weirdest problems.



    I would agree with Brad and Norton Utilities. Personally, I would recommend re-installing (Install and Archive) the OS if you have OS X 10.3 (Panther) CDs. This saves all of your user info.



    If you only have the OS restore CDs for you laptop, then I can't comment. I've never tried that.
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