Macbook crashing.

[aldo]

Just got a new 1.83GHz macbook yesterday. Added a 1GB SODIMM.

Unfortunately it does a very strange crash, where the screen itself will freeze but the cursor will move around. Music will continue playing.

If I ssh into the machine and kill windowserver, the machine will continue working fine, until it crashes again, which has happened about 3 times now.

I've done a bit of digging round and it appears to only happen when I don't have my external (DVI) display plugged in. I get these errors in system.log when it crashes:

/System/Library/CoreServices/SystemUIServer.app/Contents/MacOS/SystemUIServer: kCGErrorCannotComplete : CGSDeviceSynchronize: Invalid device window

Any ideas?

 

[evoluzione]

did you take the new RAM out?

 

[aldo]

I don't think it's the RAM, and I don't really want to take it out since it was such a pain to get in.

 

[Mitthrawnuruodo]

Get rid of** ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.systemuiserver.plist (and maybe ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.systemuiserver.<gibberish>.plist) and restart immediately. That may help...

** Delete, move or rename.

 

[Star Destroyer]

wow, can i hear the reasoning behind the removal of those files?
Just curious at what they do...

 

[Mitthrawnuruodo]

It's the preference files for the SystemUIServer, the process mentioned in the crash.log.

Preference files go bad from time to time, often causing the application/process using it to refuse to start, hang or generally misbehave. When this happens the preference file(s) needs to be fixed, or for convenience most often just deleted, a new one is being made upon restart (of the system or application in question).

 

[iMack007]

I'm having almost the same problem, but I'm having constant kernel crashes with my macbook. Its at the Fifth Avenue Apple store right now. It crashes atleast once a day, which is insane, because I also have an iMac that has only crashed once, and that was because I was foolish enough to try to install the notebook version of Tiger on it.

I just got a call back from the store, and they said after 37 hours of testing, they coudn't reproduce it. Those people have to be magical.