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Defenestrative · Nov 15, 2005, 05:55 PM

G4 Sawtooth w/ 1.2GHz Sonnet upgrade
1.5G RAM
OSX 10.4.3
Microsoft Office, fully updated.
Diskwarrior'd monthly

I am working on a book in Word. For the past month, I will often get Word to hang after importing text from Quark Express.. (actually exporting text from Quark as Word File)
I do a Force Quit and resume.

In the past month I have had a couple of kernal panics associated with iTunes and Word where I am told to Restart My Machine.

Also, for the past several months, I have OCCASIONALLY had wake from sleep issues where I had to hit the Reset button because the screen would not wake and it would just sit there.

Over the weekend I had a couple kernal panics, and then when I restarted, I got a blue screen with text saying Corrupt Stack, etc, etc, etc, etc.

I Diskwarriored and now it is running fine again, but do I have an impending CPU or RAM chip failure coming?

Thanks for your help,
John

msuper69 · Nov 15, 2005, 09:15 PM

Unsupported processor upgrade?

Defenestrative · Nov 16, 2005, 12:00 AM

Oh. Damn.
But, it has been working for years... Jaguar, Panther, Tiger. Just the last couple months have I had problems...
I think it is a RAM chip...

Sarc · Nov 16, 2005, 04:51 PM

Use your computer's hardware tools to test the ram sticks.

ShotgunEd · Nov 17, 2005, 04:01 AM

The hardware test cd will often ok a bad ram chip.

memtest is the thing to use. Google it.

Big Mac · Nov 17, 2005, 10:22 AM

You may want to try the graphical version of memtest, Rember. But if you do suspect the RAM, it's probably easier (faster) to pull it. A message about corrupted stack certainly sounds like RAM, although I have never heard of that type of message in OS X. I don't know why you would have received a blue screen - was it an unbuffered panic?

Defenestrative · Nov 18, 2005, 11:54 AM

So far I have run Tech Tool Deluxe several times and everything passed.
I ran Memtest last night, and everything passed (geez, that took 12 hours!)

I am thinking that the problems became much more frequent in the last 2 months, and I suspect the 10.4.3 update had something to do with it. (I always get that fool Keychain System Password request) So this morning I downloaded the Combo update and ran it.

Hopefully this minor "re-installation" will sort things out. It could be the result of one of the Microsoft Office updates too....

Thanks for your help,
John

Defenestrative · Nov 18, 2005, 05:39 PM

Okay, that didn't help. I still had wake from sleep problems.

Any other ideas?
John

Detrius · Nov 20, 2005, 08:35 PM

Originally Posted by Defenestrative

Over the weekend I had a couple kernal panics, and then when I restarted, I got a blue screen with text saying Corrupt Stack, etc, etc, etc, etc.

The stack keeps track of what functions have been called so that when function calls complete, code execution returns to where it came from. I think it's safe to assume that there are no bugs in this code, as any mach-based system would be having problems. Therefore, the only reasons the stack would be corrupt is if either your copy of the kernel were corrupt ( in which case, you would be having far more problems ), or you have failing hardware (RAM, or cache are most likely), in which case your problems could still be intermittent.

See my first few posts in this thread for an overview:

http://forums.macnn.com/90/mac-os-x/248286/the-thread-computer-freezes-panics-crashes/