MBP issues...(freezing, etc.)

I have a 2.16Ghz MBP with 3GB of RAM. I have had it a few months now with no problems. Recently the computer has begun to freeze up on me. One time it was the entire computer and I had to take the battery out. But the majority of the time it is just the application I am currently running (if I'm running more than one its the most fore-front application presently in use). The little colored spinning wheel pops up and the fans start running full speed (so the computer gets really loud). I'm assuming this is because it's working really hard to fix the problem and overheating? Well, it's never able to fix the problem and I always have to force quit the application. While it isn't the end of the world to have to force quit an application, I thought that was a more frequent thing for PC's, not Mac's, and it's a bit of a pain especially when you haven't save your work.
I downloaded a bunch of software for school, and switched my Safari to enable Rosetta right before all of this started happening (though safari is the most common application to freeze, it's not the only one). Could one of those things have something to do with it? In addition to the freezing (which can happen on any of my applications), safari sometimes force quits itself, just shuts down and closes completely for seemingly no reason. I've run a full virus scan and my computer is completely clean. One last thing, earlier today I opened the computer and it wouldn't come out of sleep mode, I had to hold the power button down and restart it. This has only happened once, just thought I'd add it incase is was relevant. Any ideas??? Thanks in advanced,
Michael

SafeSleep - the new "feature" in Mac notebooks

[email protected] said:

One last thing, earlier today I opened the computer and it wouldn't come out of sleep mode, I had to hold the power button down and restart it. This has only happened once, just thought I'd add it incase is was relevant. Any ideas???

Click to expand...

I think your laptop went to SafeSleep. SafeSleep is a new "feature" in Mac laptops that first occurred in Tiger/10.4 as an option. In Leopard/10.5, I don't think that there is any way to disable SafeSleep except by typing some text into Terminal. To disable SafeSleep, type in "sudo pmset hibernatemode 0" (no quotes), then hit "enter". This happens to me often, but when I "restart" my computer, my screen from before my computer went to sleep came back, and everything was normal. What SafeSleep does is that it writes the state of the RAM to the hard disk temporarily, so if it loses power, everything isn't lost. It used to only happen when you have very low battery power, but now it happens when you close the laptop. I have found that it takes much less time to rewrite the state of the RAM when you move all the windows out to the sides (fn-F11)