Long Distance Problem Diagnosis

Well my not so computer literate girlfriend is having problems with her mac she says that her computer frequently locks up and goes to a blank grey screen and she has to push to button to restart it. Anyways of diagnosing her proble from a long distance away.

She's having kernel panics: Could be caused by buggy RAM, buggy programs and messed up permissions.

Walk her through the standard troubleshooting steps:

-Repair disk permissions
-Trash .plist files if the lockups happen specifically with certain apps
-make sure she has all the latest system updates

and if that doesn't work, have her archive and reinstall OS X. (This will retain all her files and settings, but will reset the operating system, thus fixing any issues with it.)

If you don't know how to do some of the steps, do a search to learn more.

What are kernel panics?

A kernel panic is a type of error that occurs when the core (kernel) of an operating system receives an instruction in an unexpected format, or that it fails to handle properly. A kernel panic may also follow when the operating system is not able to recover from a different type of error. A kernel panic can be caused by damaged or incompatible software or, more rarely, damaged or incompatible hardware.

Click to expand...

More information and troubleshooting suggestions are available here:

http://www.macmaps.com/kernelpanic.html