Help! My powerbook needs an exorcist!

[gtk]

About three months ago my powerbook G3 with OSX 10.2 started acting crazy: shutting down at odd times, problems mounting the hard drive, renaming files and the startup disk, strange icons appearing in the control strip. After the first time this happened everything seemingly went back to normal after restarting about 15 times because drive would not mount. Gradually it began happening more and more frequently and I took it in to a computer shop specializing in mac problems. They said all they could do is change the drive which they did. Now it's starting to happen again with the new hard drive. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[witeshark]

Did you keep permissions and crons up to date? just a thought

 

[gtk]

I update whenever I get prompted by the updater. I switched to mac about a year ago so I'm still a little clueless. What are crons?

 

[rman]

I believe what witeshark is asking, is have you repaired permissions latley. Normally after you do any type of installation of software. You want to run repaor permissions. ( Mac OS X -> Applications -> Utilities -> Disk utility)

 

[gtk]

Thanks for your responses. I do use disk utility about once a week and haven't installed any new software. What I'm wondering is if using Microsoft Outlook for email will make my powerbook vunerable to viruses. My cable provider mandates that MS Outlook be used for email.

 

[rman]

I know that M$ Outlook is the hacker target of choose in the windows world. I don't know if there is a problem in OS X.

 

[StarManta]

I'm pretty sure Outlook for Mac is safe - but this IS M$, they have the ability to make anything insecure

 

[ApplejustWorks]

lol....

 

[witeshark]

Outlook is a serious target because the hackers know how to access and use the address book. I don't know if that will work in outlook on Mac OS X. If it did, All it would do is make the Mac a sender to all in the address book, unless permissions are set not allowing that execution without the user knowing but what a stupid ISP! In any case, the doz registry vulnerability obviously doesn't exist in Mac. But then, this seems to make me wonder what outlook is being used on Mac?

 

[StarManta]

Outlook Express for pre-OSX exists, but now M$'s email program for OS X is called Entourage and comes with Office v.x. Why they bother I have no idea, however... From my brief experience the interface is utter crap compared to Mail and even to Outlook Express for Windows. Unless there are some prefs that need to be set to make it not suck....

 

[witeshark]

Well surprise surprise, isn't that a classic. Mac mail rocks! Why use anything else...