Forums | MacLife

This morning, it worked fine.  Then this afternoon things started running slowly and the beach ball was always spinning like the processor was running at 100%.  I checked activity monitor (having just had this problem with the iShockII plug-in) and I was only using 20 or so percent of the processor with 256mb of ram left.  (It's a 12" 1Ghz Powerbook with 512mb of ram running 10.3.8)  So I restarted.  After that it only took a minute or two until the beach ball showed up again.  I couldn't select any of the dock icons or make the force quit box show up so I again restarted then tried to run Disk Utility.  Once again the computer froze while dick utility was running.

Pretty concerned with what was happening, I put in the Restore disk and tried to run disk utility from that, but instead it just froze at the primary "Welcome to install" screen.  I decided it was time to try and get what I could off the computer so I hooked it up to my MDD and ran it in target disk mode.  It mounts fine and runs for several minutes then the firewire icon onscreen stops moving and all file transfers stop.  This is where the timer of death is.  I haven't timed it but I've done this 4 or 5 times trying to get all the files off (luckily I backed up a month or two ago so it's not everything) and every time it freezes at just about the same time.  Is there hope?  I figured I'd try here before calling AppleCare and paying $50.

Oh yeah, I don't have applecare on the computer.  Stupid I know, but please don't tell me what I already feel like crap for not doing.