Apps Always Crashing

We run 3 or 4 G4 macs here in the office. Its a graphic design office and we have illustartor and photoshop etc. installed on the machines. These computers are min. install with the Creative Suite and suitcase. However, they crash quite a bit (especially illustrator) and often you need to restart the machine to stop illustrator from crashing. Does anyone else have similiar problems and what can I do to fix this or find out whats causing it.

Thanks.

I'll give this a guess and say,Sounds like memory (ram) is low how much ram do these machines have? Improve your memory, I bet thats it

eh well they have about 768mb and there might be mail, ps, ill and something else open at the same time. Could this really be the reason for making them crash so much, would that not just slow them down?

roamer said:

eh well they have about 768mb and there might be mail, ps, ill and something else open at the same time. Could this really be the reason for making them crash so much, would that not just slow them down?

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Same for me but it is with CS2 and MS Office for Mac that it occurs. But I think it is just the program with bugs because I haven't had issues before that and I have had 1.256GB RAM from the beginning. And it is not just this computer because i have used on PB and G5 Tower with same result. Sometimes it works flawless the next time it quits on me. But now I just save every time I make a change I like.

It sounds like bad memory to me. All your macs crash like this with using the same programs? Did you get your ram from the same place? The chances of all of them getting bad ram is pretty slim so that might not be it.. My other guess is suitcase.. I've heard things are not going so well with that program these days

Murlyn said:

It sounds like bad memory to me. All your macs crash like this with using the same programs? Did you get your ram from the same place? The chances of all of them getting bad ram is pretty slim so that might not be it.. My other guess is suitcase.. I've heard things are not going so well with that program these days

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As far as the one's I use, two are from my job and one is my personal. The two from job have Apple RAM and I went 3rd party on mine. The programs don't crash for me all the time but it happens more than I like. Didn't happen before I put CS and CS2 on there. MS office just sucked from the beginning.

Just an opinion here but I have seen MS Office crash a lot on Macs and even windows but worse on Macs. Adobe Photoshop even on a Windows XP system sometimes will quit to the desktop but not all the time. I have heard more people with CS and CSII reporting occasional quitting to the desktop with both Panther and Tiger. Most of these people are heavy Graphic Artists that are constantly using photoshop. I have only had Photoshop 7 quit to the desktop on me once that I can remember. I can deal with that, but it it did it many times a day, something has to be wrong. I would first off suspect bad RAM or something wrong with the install of PS or the configuration files.

Also you might try finding the photoshop .plist file in username/library/preferences and deleting it. I have seen many programs in OSX that the .plist file was messed up and caused the program to crash.

I always delete the plist file if I have any problems with programs. Then I check and repair permissions - it usually sorts things out unless it is an hardware issue such as faulty memory.

how do you check and repair permissions.

Go into Applications -> Utilities -> Disk Utility, Click on your hard drive and then click on "Repair Disk Permissions"

ok, also the would I get much benefit out of reformatting the drive and loading osx on again

It's possible, but if it's a CS problem.. then you'll just get the problems back when you load up CS.. that would be a good test at least on one of your computers, if you can deal without CS for a little while.. Reload OS X, clean install, and then use it for awhile, see if it crashes etc.. if it does, it sounds like bad memory, since OS X is very very solid. I find Panther to be more solid than Tiger, but I have not had a crash so it's solid And then if all is going well, then install CS and if it starts crashing again.. you've got some serious CS problems...

If it is CS problems, whats the best way to troubleshoot these?

Talk to Adobe I guess.. if you find that it is a CS problem there really is not much that you can do, unless you can upgrade.. then that might be the way to go.. or look at Adobe's forums and find out if there is anything that you can do.

ok, thanks for the help. Ill check it out this evening