Tiger Meltdown

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I'm not totally proficient with Macs, but my wife loves them and it has been our home computer for several years now. Yesterday it reached critical mass.

Basically, I was the last one to use the computer at about 2:30 in the afternoon, and I watched some YouTube videos which were running a bit slower than normal but that happens sometimes so I didn't think much of it. I then went to work.

My wife got home about 5:00, tried to open Safari, and the icon changed in the dock to an applescript icon and it just kept bouncing. She then tried firefox and that icon changed and just kept bouncing. So then she tried to retstart and things got really wacky.

Basically, the computer will start up, and it will be the plain white screen with the gray apple in the middle, and the OS will never load. It just has that little circle thing that continually rotates. My concern is losing some pictures that are only on the harddrive but it sounds like an OS problem to me since the icons were changing to applescript icons, like it was just trying to open the program as code.

I didn't do anything out of the ordinary that I haven't done over the last 6 years with it and this happened. Is there a way to just force the OS to reinstall? Do I have to take this to get fixed? I really don't know where to go from here and I'd rather not spend the money in an iStore.

I would really appreciate any help.
 
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repairing permissions while booted from the install cd may help. look here for instruction.

If you do not have the install cd handy. Start the computer up while holding down the cmd key + s during startup. The computer will boot to a black screen with white writing (looks like the old dos days) at the # type this (without quotation marks) "fsck -yf" hit enter and this will attempt to repair the startup permissions (this may take a bit). if there are any errors it will attempt to fix them. do this until it says there are no errors. when it gets back to the prompt type "exit" and the machine will restart.

-hope this helps
 

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