[captiva]

I've been reading around that I should keep my pageouts at 0. But which number does that refer to? When "top" says "3649(0) pageouts" ... what does the (0) mean vs the 3649?

FWIW I'm on a 768Mhz G4 with about 800MB ram and 10G free on the hard drive, running 10.2.6:

Processes: 57 total, 4 running, 53 sleeping... 170 threads 08:26:28
Load Avg: 1.50, 1.12, 1.03 CPU usage: 39.8% user, 25.8% sys, 34.4% idl
SharedLibs: num = 113, resident = 27.3M code, 2.05M data, 8.89M LinkEdit
MemRegions: num = 8041, resident = 340M + 13.3M private, 242M shared
PhysMem: 76.6M wired, 508M active, 285M inactive, 870M used, 25.8M free
VM: 4.69G + 66.4M 19705(0) pageins, 3649(0) pageouts

I'm paying closer attention to what's going on inside my Mac because a couple days ago, for the first time since upgrading to 10.2.6 (january 2003), my Mac sort of crashed. (It was idle for a few hours and when I walked by there was a message on the screen, something like, "your mac had an error and has to restart; choose Restart or hold down the Power button for a few seconds" ... and behind that message the finder/app windows were sort of screened out and nothing was accessible...so I couldn't choose Restart... holding the power button worked and it restarted okay.)

cap

[bradoesch]

There's not too much you can do to control the number of pageouts you're having, except for getting more RAM. I have 1 GB in my iMac DV and I still get lots of pageouts after it's been running for a while.
The gray screen you got is what's called a kernel panic. That's how it looks in Jaguar, in previous versions you saw text scroll down the screen and the computer froze. One kernel panic once in a while is nothing to worry about, but if it stats happening frequently you can sometimes determine what's causing them and try and stop it.