Starting From Scratch

Hey everyone,
I have been having numrous problems with my mac, that I never had on my old one. I now have an aluminium intel iMac 2-Ghz... The most common problem is applications randomly crashing, and when I try to force quit them, they dissapear but still have he little black arrow underneath...

Then when i try to restart or shut down, it gets stuck on a blue screen with the swirling circle of black lines... i even left it for about 3 hours one day... so then i have to turn off at the back.

Any advice on this would be really apprecitated. I am thinking of starting from scratch, and reinstalling my OS (Tiger).... Any ideas?

Regards, Owen

Welcome to Mac-Forums!

As you can see from this link, there are a lot of things that could cause it.
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/multipleappsquit.html

I'd start with Disk Utility. Run Repair Permissions and then Verify Disk. If it needs repaired, you'll need to boot from your restore disk and run Disk Utility (Repair Disk) from there.

Then try the Apple Hardware test. Try to rule out any hardware problems.

Could also use OnyX. Run the maintenance scripts, clear caches, etc..

If all else fails, you could try the Archive and Install option. If there's nothing you need saved, then I would recommend the Erase and Install.
If you wanted, you could bypass all the above and go straight to the install options.;D
I'd still run the hardware test though...

thanks Soulwar, i didn't know about the hardware test - that's great to know...

I have Onyx, but never have noticed a difference in performance after running all of the scripts and maintenance.

Just incase I need to reinstall.. I would like to Erase and Install - But I do have a lot of important files. I've already backed everything up on an external hard drive, so does that mean after the install i just copy everything back into their original place - such as the iPhoto and iTunes library files etc...?

Thanks again!
Owen

As far as iTunes and iPhoto, most programs in general, I would use the import feature. (add to library)