Lots and lots of crashing on a new G4 iBook

[pyknosis]

My wife has been using a new G4 iBook for about 5-6 weeks. She's experiencing a lot of crashes with various different programs... M$ Word crashes >5 times a day with an "unexpected error," Palm Desktop has crashed a couple times with "Error #-1000," etc. She's got 384MB RAM, so I don't think she should be having a memory crunch, since she doesn't really multitask. I'm using the same programs on my 15" G4 AluBook running the same system as her iBook (10.3.1) without any crashing problems, so I don't think these crashes are coming from incompatibilities between the programs and the OS.

Any ideas out there as to why her iBook would crash continually? Could it be a bad memory stick? Something else wrong with the hardware? Anyone think Applecare will be able to get this problem fixed if I call them?

Thanks for any suggestions.

 

[bousozoku]

Run disk utility and repair permissions as well as the drive.

If the situation continues and you're using RAM from someone other than OtherWorld Computing or Crucial, remove the extra stick and see if the crashes still occur. You might do that anyway, but those two are normally quite reliable.

 

[pyknosis]

Thanks, bousozoku! I repaired permissions and Word hasn't crashed during ~12 hours of use (previously Word would crash every 1-2 hours). That may have done the trick. Thanks.