[Nick_G]

Hi all.

I have been getting an intermittent problem here with the mouse becoming unresponsive. I usually get a warning beforehand in that the cursor will freeze momentarily whilst moving across the screen. Eventually it freezes completely and no amount of wiggling the mouse, disconnecting & reconnecting helps.

A force restart is no good either as when the computer starts up the cursor remains frozen. The way I've been getting around it is by pulling the plug out. I know this is a bad idea but I really can't think of any other way out. Are there any keystrokes I can use to shut the computer down without resorting to such drastic action?

Worryingly, up till recently this problem was a very rare occurrence but it's happened twice today in the last few hours.

I am running a Power Mac G4 800MHz with 512MB RAM and running Mac OS X 10.3.2.

Many thanks for any help or advice.

[P]

Any reason you are on such an old OS? At least update it to 10.3.9, which is free.

Things to check:

* Open Activity Monitor (in your Utilities folder): Is there some process that's eating CPU just when this happens?
* Us Console (same place) to see if there's anything interesting in the logs.
* Check your disk with Disk Utility (guess where?)
* Reapply the latest Combo update - but in your case, that's install 10.3.9 as I already suggested.

[Big Mac]

It sounds a lot like that old Panther bug some people experienced whereby a particular network daemon would cause the system to eventually bog down and die. It was a problem with lookupd, right?

I agree with P that at the very least you should update to 10.3.9, Nick.

[Nick_G]

Thanks for the tips above.

I know this is was a while ago, but I have updated to 10.3.9, and also tried using a different browser (Opera instead of Firefox). However, it is still happening. I checked the disk in Disk Utility quite recently and (on an unrelated problem) and it doesn't seem to have helped.

The keyboard also becomes unresponsive as I tried the Control-Option-Apple-Eject combo with no luck. The computer doesn't freeze up though, just the mouse & keyboard. Very strange.

It's not related to going online either as the cursor movement is sometimes going 'jerky' even just after the computer has been switched on.

What sort of things do I look for in Console? I'm not up on Unix or anything technical.

Something must have changed though as this never used to happen.

[Big Mac]

Have you tried a different keyboard? The keyboard connection may be failing, and if the mouse is connected to the keyboard you would think both were at fault.

[Nick_G]

I did wonder about that but if it was a problem with the keyboard then wouldn't it still be frozen after pulling the plug & restarting?

[P]

Not necessarily. Restarting resets a lot of things.