Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

stefanicotine · Sep 17, 2006, 04:41 PM

I'm hoping you guys can help me figure this out. My iMac is crashing like crazy. In the past 12 hours I've had to do a cold reboot at least 4 times. It seems to happen most when I have iTunes running. Usually it'll just hang and never snap out of it. I can still move the mouse and it still plays through my songs but I can't click anything. After a while the cursor changes to the beach ball but that's all it does. One time it froze when my screen saver came on. It's really starting to grind my gears.

Anyway, I'll provide as much info as I can:

Apps Running: Safari, iTunes 7, Adium, Quicksilver, Mail

Peripherals added recently: Apple bluetooth keyboard and bluetooth Mighty Mouse

Recent changes: I reformatted the other day. Reinstalled OS X with two partitions. Decided that's no good, because I couldn't run bootcamp. So I deleted the second partition using iPartition 1.5.2. The partition no longer shows up, but bootcamp still doesn't work. Something about being unable to move my files.

Trivial info: Secondary monitor is set to 270° for portrait view, all software is up-to-date (OS X 10.4.7).

Computer: 20" 2ghz Intel iMac, 2GB RAM, 256MB VRAM

stefanicotine · Sep 17, 2006, 05:48 PM

Perhaps this will help? I took it from the "Exited process.crash" log:

Code:
Binary Images Description:

**********

Host Name:      Mr-Mac
Date/Time:      2006-09-15 01:03:17.945 -0700
OS Version:     10.4.7 (Build 8J2135)
Report Version: 4

Command: Exited process
Path:    Exited process
Parent:  kernel_task [0]

Version: ??? (???)

PID:    904
Thread: Unknown

Exception:  EXC_BAD_ACCESS (0x0001)
Codes:      KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE (0x0002) at 0x00000024
(null)
Unknown thread crashed with i386 Thread State:
eax: 0x00000024    ebx: 0x90001983 ecx:0x00000000 edx: 0x00000002
edi: 0x0180cbcc    esi: 0x00000024 ebp:0xb009dec8 esp: 0xb009dea0
 ss: 0x0000002f    efl: 0x00010286 eip:0x90001986  cs: 0x00000027
 ds: 0x0000002f     es: 0x0000002f  fs:0x00000000  gs: 0x00000037

Hiramw · Sep 17, 2006, 06:07 PM

Hi,

Did you add RAM or did it come from Apple with 2GB? You might try removing one of the RAM modules? If the crashing doesn't stop, put the one you took out back in and try removing the other one.

Hiram

stefanicotine · Sep 17, 2006, 09:05 PM

Originally Posted by Hiramw

Hi,

Did you add RAM or did it come from Apple with 2GB? You might try removing one of the RAM modules? If the crashing doesn't stop, put the one you took out back in and try removing the other one.

Hiram

Nah, it's stock RAM. And it's worked great before this so it's highly unlikely it's the RAM. However, I just did a reformat / install and I think I found the problem. The system was running great right after the install, and when it came time for updates I did everything but iTunes 7 (I'd been hearing how it's caused problems for others so I figured I'd play it safe and see if that was the problem). But alas, the problem still remains. I'm really thinking the 10.4.7 update is to blame.

Anyway to uninstall the update? I'd really hate to do yet another install.

stefanicotine · Sep 17, 2006, 09:31 PM

I got it

Turns out my rotated display was the culprit. Seems that 10.4.7 has an issue with screensavers and rotated displays. Seems kind of weird though. Hopefully this is the end of my problems for a while.