Why are my Macs crashing?
Dec. 18th, 2005 07:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gizaOkay, so I currently have two Macs. A 1.5 year old 15" Powerbook, running OS/X 10.3, and a 6 month old 20" iMac, running OS/X 10.4. Both OSes are up to date.
Over the course of the last few days, both machines have started crashing on a regular basis. At least, I guess "crashing" is the right word to use. What happens is that all of my currently running applications get killed in some manner or another (including the dock), leaving me as though I had just logged in. Sometimes FireFox and Adium display their crash dialogs, but sometimes they just silently "disappear".
In the way of troubleshooting, I've tried the following:
- Run Preferential Treatment to make sure my preferences weren't whacked. They were fine.
- Booted from the install DVD and ran the extended diagnostics. Everything looked fine.
- Checked the system logs. Nothing of interest gets written. It's as though the processes were killed normally.
- I reset the PRAM on both machines.
I'm hesitant to call AppleCare just yet, because I can't reproduce this problem reliably, and part of my wonders if it's something that I might have done on both machines.
As an act of desperation, I created new accounts on each machine without admin access, and have been using them, just on the off chance that the problem is due to a bad setting in each account.
The whole thing has me really confused, seeing that it's happening to both machines at the same time. I'm on a UPS, so I've ruled out power-related issues. It's also odd that only my processes are being affected, and all of them at once. It's not like init or sshd is crashing at all or I have a single app (like.. Firefox!) crashing.
Does anyone have any ideas? Because I'm running out of them...
Over the course of the last few days, both machines have started crashing on a regular basis. At least, I guess "crashing" is the right word to use. What happens is that all of my currently running applications get killed in some manner or another (including the dock), leaving me as though I had just logged in. Sometimes FireFox and Adium display their crash dialogs, but sometimes they just silently "disappear".
In the way of troubleshooting, I've tried the following:
- Run Preferential Treatment to make sure my preferences weren't whacked. They were fine.
- Booted from the install DVD and ran the extended diagnostics. Everything looked fine.
- Checked the system logs. Nothing of interest gets written. It's as though the processes were killed normally.
- I reset the PRAM on both machines.
I'm hesitant to call AppleCare just yet, because I can't reproduce this problem reliably, and part of my wonders if it's something that I might have done on both machines.
As an act of desperation, I created new accounts on each machine without admin access, and have been using them, just on the off chance that the problem is due to a bad setting in each account.
The whole thing has me really confused, seeing that it's happening to both machines at the same time. I'm on a UPS, so I've ruled out power-related issues. It's also odd that only my processes are being affected, and all of them at once. It's not like init or sshd is crashing at all or I have a single app (like.. Firefox!) crashing.
Does anyone have any ideas? Because I'm running out of them...