On Thu, 2004-01-15 at 14:17, Rex Baldazo wrote: > Basically my friend says that every so often, the screen on his Mac starts > getting weird artifacts, like a cloud of little dots start appearing around > this mouse pointer. And then eventually he gets a shade that pulls down from > the menu bar that tells him he has to restart, and this screen has that > message in about a dozen languages.
This is the result of what's called a kernel panic. It's pretty much the same as the BSoD in Windows. The Mac OS X kernel is pretty robust, and it usually takes something really messed up to make it panic. One of the most common reasons is lack of RAM and swap space. Check to see if the boot drive is almost full and recommend at least 384 MB of real RAM. More is better. I'd run a hardware check on the machine with something like Techtool. The only time I ever had a kernel panic was when my Ethernet card started going out. > | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will > | be January 27. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. > | This list's page is <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>. | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be January 27. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. | This list's page is <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>.
