Why Apple, why?

Just a bit ago my screen fades like a veil has been pulled over it I can't move the mouse or anything keyboard doesn't work etc. and it says "You must restart, hold in the power button for 7 seconds and release" then it was repeated in Korean and French... and German (maybe).

I am not concerned thinking it wasn't Apple, and possibly spyware or something sinister... its in the back of mind though as in a year I've never seen this message them WHAM! I do.

My problem with this is.... I had macjournal open and lost about 30 minutes of work and lost a yahoo! pool game.

Ugh, I thought I was leaving the lack of control and random out of place no explanation forced restarts when I sold my peecee.

Oh snap.

You might want to replace the RAM.

What you had is called a "Kernel panic" and is sort of the equivalent of Windows' BSOD (Blue screen of Death).
A Mac, just like a PC, is nothing else than a computer, and yes, even a Mac can "die" like that...
But luckily, this happens very very rarely. As you noted yourself, you never saw it before.
BSODs happen a lot more often, as you probably know... ;-)

But seriously now...
If it happens more often, try to find out what can provocate it, for example which programs you were running. If it always happens with the same combination of running programs, it's a software problem, related to one of those programs.

More ram, eh?

I guess its about time... I've been putting it off since the day I bought this bad boy, trying to assure myself I can run 1,000 + songs, tons of mb of video media, photoshop, etc on 256.... how foolish.

Thanks for the information guys... to delete or not to delete to buy or not to buy, isn't that the question of the hour.

No no, not more RAM, new RAM,

Come again? How can my ram be corrupt its only a year old.

I know it's all too often suggested as a "cure-all" in OS X, but do you routinely repair permissions and run the maintenance scripts?

Basically, the things that can cause a kernel panic are
- Defective hardware (including and especially memory) and
- peripheral devices with kernel-level drivers (kext's) that are screwy.

If you have added any new peripherals recently, that might be the culprit. My USB cellular phone/modem has caused a kernel panic or two, for no sane reason. I also had a FireWire hard drive that seemed to enjoy throwing up kernel panics on a G4 iMac a while ago.

If you haven't added any peripherals, then you may want to run some hardware diagnostics using the Hardware Test CD that came with your Mac.