Humming noise and system freeze/crash!!

Question

hope you guys can give me some advice here! i bought a A1150 macbook pro 15" 2.0ghz 80gb 512mb ram new from a computer store 6-7months ago and my first impressions where good. it was fast, but it got slower especially with using adobe programs, major problem as im a photographer and i only really use photoshop and bridge plus indesign so i need a faster speed. so i upgraded the ram to 1gb. im a student and therefore 2gb was too expensive and also i couldnt afford it as i had stretched myself to buy the comp in the first place over a dell which i had always used before.
anyway over time the computer started to annoy me! some of the keys got very sticky, and the click pad would stick, but also the heat from the macbook pro was intense! it was as if i had slept beside a radiator all night!
but the real problem started about a week ago. i had split my HD into 55gb mac and 20gb windows through bootcamp. annoying that an 80gb hardrive is only 74.5gb!! but anyway, it worked fine, but a few days after i uninstalled windows as i didnt use it much and i had a windows desktop i started having problems. well one problem!!
i was doing a batch of over 200 photos through adobe bridge and a script i had on photoshop with actions when all of a sudden a crazy mooing noise came from the top left corner of my macbook pro! then i got the famous little rainbow ball that started only over the program, i tried opening itunes and safari which i had open at that time but nothing worked. the mouse moved but it didnt respond! so i left it thinking maybe it was just a temperary thing as i had left the ntoebook on for nearly a full day! but after 20minutes the sound was still the same, and the computer was still frozen! i tried the control/apple/escape key - didnt work, then the restart short keys and didnt work. but the holding down the power did work! i ahd to restart it, it started up fine, i tried to figure out the problem but couldnt anywhere! i had lost all of my editted images, which really annoyed me, but i thought it was a one off, but then it did it again.
so i tried working with it with and without the cable as i got a replacement from apple for a new power cable, the old one melted! hmmm how many people have had that? but it kept crashing, whether i was browsing the net, reading emails, editting, watching a film anything basically! in total yesterday it crashed 9 times in using it for 3-4hours! alot of times huh?
anyway the sound sounds like a mooing startup engine on a cold morning which wont fire up! i thought it was the hard drive but tbh it sounds more like a power problem! and its quite noisy!
the problem is that im currently in moldova, eastern europe working for a charity in a gap year. ive got my family to call apple, and they gave me the take out battery rubbish and hold down the powr for 5 seconds. well ive done that lots of times and still it does it. it actually did it 30minutes before i put this post up! so they gave me a few options call up apple and let them guide me througha repair for £35 ($50). or take it to an apple store to be fixed! thats rich when im nowhere near one! so basically they are trying to make me pay to go home to repair my notebook!
i dont know what to do, i feel like asking for a full refund or throwing the notebook at them as its only given me grief. i went 3 weeks waiting for my powercable to come out after it suddenly melted over night!
its my first mac and tbh im almost scared whether to buy another apple laptop, or anything apple related as ive never had these problems witha sony or a dell ive had before on windows!
whats your thoughts? im stuck for words and dont know what to ask from apple!! help is needed!!!
thanks
macbook pro 2.0ghz dual core   Mac OS X (10.4.8)  

Answer 1

Lone_Wolf wrote:
P.S. Wonder why I never caught faulty memory caused exception under Windows.
The error was probably in high memory.
Linux tries to use all available memory, while windows tries to minimize memory used .
(and with their memory management method they badly NEED to do that)
To the point. It was the second DRAM plank and the faulty area was around 15.7GB. If it was not Linux, I would probably never know I had out of order memory area. Under Windows I played all the modern games, had tons of open tabs in browser, had few IDEs open at the same moment. It never failed me. From that I conclude that 16 GB of RAM is a huge overkill for a usual desktop.
@nstgc, no it didn't look like this for me. Actually the only repeating pattern I got crashes under was writing to the disk or usb stick. My speculation would be, that kernel allocates write cache memory somehow around the top edge of the physical memory.