I have been getting GUI freezes now on my 15" PowerBook several times daily for the past week. Everything on the screen will freeze but the mouse will keep moving, but I cannot click on anything and I do not get the beachball. Sometimes after a few seconds the mouse will also freeze. I cannot do anything to get out of it other than a hard reset. I cannot SSH into the machine while it is frozen but I can ping it.
I don't need to be doing anything special for it to freeze but it has never frozen when I wasn't actively using the computer (it hasn't froze when I wasn't there). I often lost unsaved schoolwork and other open documents when I get these freezes and I got so fed up that I wiped my hard disk clean (zeroed all data) and I reinstalled 10.3 from scratch and I have not applied any OS updates (I was suspicious of the 10.3.3 update and all that is offered to me in Software update is the 10.3.3 combined update). However after using my PowerBook for a few hours I just got my first freeze after the reformat, telling me that 10.3.3 is probably not the problem.
I really don't know what is causing this. It seems like it could be a hardware problem but it is hard to reproduce since it needs to be used for several hours to freeze so I don't see how I could get Apple to do anything for me. The one piece of software that I am suspicious of is Adium, since I just started using the Adium 2 beta regularly 10 days ago. I am going to go back to Adium 1.6 and see if that prevents freezes but I don't think it will.
I was wondering if anyone else has had similar problems. I don't have problems like this with any other Mac in OS X, just my 15". This sort of freezing just started but several months ago I used to experience intermittent freezes where I would get a temporary GUI lockup, but after a few seconds to a minute I could move the mouse again and everything was normal. Those old freezes usually happened when I was running iPhoto so I keep iPhoto closed when I'm not using it now out of habit. These new freezes (which are obviously much worse) do not require iPhoto to be open. Usually the apps that are open when it freezes are Mail, Safari, iTunes, Adium 2, iCal and sometimes Address Book, TextEdit and SubEthaEdit.
So does anyone have any ideas? I can't take all this freezing and restarting. It is driving me nuts.
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