System slows down and becomes unusable till reboot of notebook

Alright, I will TRY to give as much detail as I can. I received my pb (powerbook) on Thursday the 17th of Feb. It's been almost a week now and I have been trying to watch the system to see when my problem occurs.

The problem itself is this: The notebook sits idle and goes to screensaver and then to sleep. Everyone knows that’s the default settings for pwr mngmnt.
That itself isn't the issue it is when I move the mouse or end the sleep to use it. It will have the back ground img with a reverse colored square in the middle of the screen. That’s how I know this problem has occurred. And it only seems to happen after it’s been idle a long time. It's VERY VERY slow and the response time is about 15 seconds after I click on anything. The only way I have been able to fix this is hard resetting it. Then it works fine till it’s left alone for awhile. (Doesn’t seem to be overheating is rather cool to touch.)

Other things I want to note are:
I have upgraded memory to 768. Did all patches from system update, and also went to the website and got the upgrade to 10.3.8. I have only installed these apps: Adium (newest version), WOW (world of warcraft), Firefox (newest version), and lastly opera (latest version)

If anyone can help me I'd really appreciate it. Also, If I have missed anything let me know, I will add to the post. If you want you can send me a private message or just simply respond here in the topic.

Thanks for the help in advance,
onryou

BTW, I have tried to search google and apple docs. I might be looking the wrong way, but I haven't been able to find anything on this issue.

faulty RAM perhaps? try taking out the RAM and see if the problem still occurs. otherwise call Apple.

tariq said:

faulty RAM perhaps? try taking out the RAM and see if the problem still occurs. otherwise call Apple.

Click to expand...

I thought that might be it, but it's only when it comes back from a sleep mode. And this is after say, 3 hours of being idle.

onryou

There is a known issue for powerbooks after coming out of sleep due to the 10.3.8 update. It doesn't happen with all powerbooks, but many. It was on macfixit.com yesterday, and they said the only way to fix it for now is to just reboot.

Jason you're THE MAN! Going to check that out now.

Thanks,
onryou

No problem They updated the article, it's posted on the right side of this forum's main page.

You could also try bringing up Terminal (in Applications/Utilities) and type "top". This will show you what processes you have running, in order of CPU usage by default. The other day I found a rogue process which was hogging all my CPU cycles even though it was doing nothing. I can't remember what it was, offhand, but killing it solved the problem.

David

update

Okay, If I log off the user and then put it to sleep I don't have problems.

onryou