Crashing Mac - help!!

[lostkat]

My Dad is having issues with his Mac (don't ask what sort, it's a huge white thing with the computer/screen integrated into 1 unit). He says that it's fine in the mornings, but around lunchtime it starts freezing on him, getting black lines across the screen etc. He can't force quit the programme so he has to just turn it off and back on again.

He's a photographer, so is mostly using Photoshop.

He tried to re-create the situation for me yesterday, worked on an image for 5 mins and all of a sudden Firefox windows started popping up. There were hundreds of them and they just kept coming up and he couldn't do anything to stop them. I asked if he'd swapped the keyboard in case it was a key getting stuck down and he has.

I know absolutely bog all about Macs, so I'm at a loss as to what to suggest. It looks to me like a virus, but I know that Macs don't really get them.

Any suggestions???

[leowyatt]

Well first thing to try is to uninstall firefox, see if that fixes the situation

[Burble]

My first thought is that it's over heating especially if it only starts happenin g after a few hours of working and when you're getting towards the hotter part of the day. OS X is clever enough (most of the time) to not get in such a state that you can't force quit something so if it is getting to that state I'd be looking at the hardware. Though the Firefox windows popping up are very strange.

Try taking the thing apart (never a trivial job with a Mac but still definitely possible) and blow out any accumulated dust and crap that's got in there.

[Feek]

It does sound as though it's heat related but I'd also suggest grabbing Onyx (http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs/english.html) (it's free) to clean out the caches and run the automation as well.

[iCraig]

To me it sounds like Firefox is bugged out and needs to be reinstalled. Has he installed any plugins for it recently?

The crashing might be just a side effect of the sudden onslaught on the CPU and RAM with all those windows coming out of nowhere, unless the crashing happens before the windows appear?

Could certainly be overheating in that case. Maybe there's an OSX app out there that will monitor temperatures for you? If they steadily rise throughout the morning and get very high prior to it dying (I'd imagine the tolerance is the same as it is on PCs, which would be 80c and above) then that's most likely the problem.