Odd freezing problems

[joooollie]

I have a month old white macbook: 2ghz, 1gig ram, and i think an80gig hard drive
Since i bought it, i have been having HUGE problems with freezing. First, it freezes practically every time i use microsoft word, but i think this is to be expected because it is non native. Also, ninety percent of the time, when i try to turn the computer off by clicking the apple button in the top left corner and navigating the drop down menu to the shut down button, it freezes. What usually happens is as soon as i try to click the little blue apple, the rainbow "twirly beach ball" shows up and will not go away no matter how long i wait. So i basically ALWAYS have to shut down my computer by holding the power switch. Any ideas? I do have applecare

 

[mad jew]

What third party hardware do you have? Was the RAM from Apple? If you create a new user account in System Preferences, do you get the freezing problems there too? All this instability isn't normal, even if Office is a Microsoft app.

 

[joooollie]

.

I have no third party hardware, ram was installed by apple as was everything else, and word is the only software installed

 

[theblotted]

try the usual suspects: repair permissions, fsck -fy, reset PRAM, update pre-binding.

also run memtest just in case, Apple can send bad RAM (tho slim chance).

if those don't work, try reinstalling the OS again, with unneeded apps unchecked.

last resort, Apple Care.

G'luck.

 

[Gosh]

How often do you run maintenance?

http://www.applelinks.com/p5/index.php/more/mac_os_x_system_maintenance_utilities_roundup/

 

[mad jew]

How much free hard drive space do you have? Make sure there's at least 8GB free.

Also, I think theblotted is onto something with fsck. If you don't want to run fsck just yet, you can check whether it needs to be run by verifying your hard drive in Disk Utility. This'll take a while but if it comes back with any errors, then follow the steps in the fsck article I linked to earlier in this post.

 

[Grakkle]

I had similar problems with my macbook, exact same specs as yours. Not as severe or frequent, but it did freeze a few times.

I reinstalled OSX and it's been fine since. I suspect registry corruption or the like.

 

[AvMac]

I had similar problems with my macbook, exact same specs as yours. Not as severe or frequent, but it did freeze a few times.

I reinstalled OSX and it's been fine since. I suspect registry corruption or the like.

Correct me if I am wrong since I am new to the OS X world.

I thought there was no "Registry" in OS X.

 

[Grakkle]

Correct me if I am wrong since I am new to the OS X world.

I thought there was no "Registry" in OS X.

Oops, right you are - my bad word choice! I should have said 'file corruption'. OSX does have Netinfo, which apparently is similar to the windows registry but not exactly the same.

 

[theblotted]

Oops, right you are - my bad word choice! I should have said 'file corruption'. OSX does have Netinfo, which apparently is similar to the windows registry but not exactly the same.

i'm not familiar with Windows, tho i'd like to use it in near future with my Intel mac. can you explain this a bit please?

 

[Grakkle]

i'm not familiar with Windows, tho i'd like to use it in near future with my Intel mac. can you explain this a bit please?

Sorry, I don't know enough about it to be intelligible - I've never done much with it.