Ibook crashes when idle

Question

Hi,
I bought an ibook about a month ago and I have never had any problems with it. But a couple of days ago it started crashing, when I stopped using it. Even if I just boot mac os x (i.e. without starting any application) and then leave it idle for a couple of minutes.
I still can move around with the mouse pointer, but can't click on anything. Any keyboard short cuts don't work either except for the restart shortcut. However it never crashes during the startup or when busy.
In addition I sometimes get an Airport related kernel panic error, which forces me to reboot it.
My ibook doesn't have any additional RAM or anything else added after I bought it. It has the standard specs (40GB, 512RAM)
Would be nice if anybody can help.
Thanks,
Naomi
ibook G4   Mac OS X (10.4.6)  

Answer 1

Hi Adrian,
I repaired the permissions using the Disk Utility - everything looked fine and nothing had to be fixed.
Next thing I do will be the Combo Update.
Well, no, can't think of anything I changed... if I look back now, I think at first the ibook crashed maybe once a day. Furthermore I didn't use it daily because I was sick. But now it's heavily used so it crashes much more often, but unfortunately I can't reproduce it - as I said, it doesn't always happen if it's idle. E.g. while I charged it I used it, then it was idle and it crashed. After reboot it was idle again, but it didn't crash... - everything was fine until it was fully charged so that I removed the power cable, but then it crashed again immediately.
Back to things which could have changed: the ibook isn't connected to any printer, no new applications were installed.
I checked "System Preferences>Accounts>Log in Items" which is empty.
I checked the panic.log - as I mentioned earlier, sometimes it crashes differently by showing a reboot message. The panic log contains something like this:
=================
Tue Jun 6 12:38:45 2006
panic(cpu 0 caller 0x0028C7E4): mbuf address out of range 0x47100000
Latest stack backtrace for cpu 0:
Backtrace:
0x00095718 0x00095C30 0x0002683C 0x0028C7E4 0x0027A908 0x005B600C 0x005B6168 0x006BB804
0x00680D5C 0x006A3F54 0x0069598C 0x006C11F8 0x0069DB7C 0x006BD790 0x006BE0C0 0x006BD1BC
0x006BD058 0x002D0FF8 0x006BB3C8 0x006BC690 0x002EB5E4 0x0008CC90 0x000291C0 0x000233AC
0x000AC02C 0x00000000
Kernel loadable modules in backtrace (with dependencies):
com.apple.iokit.AppleAirPort2(402.6)@0x67e000
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IONetworkingFamily(1.5.0)@0x5ab000
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOPCIFamily(1.7)@0x47c000
com.apple.iokit.IONetworkingFamily(1.5.0)@0x5ab000
Proceeding back via exception chain:
Exception state (sv=0x2D5DC780)
PC=0x9000B0A8; MSR=0x0200F030; DAR=0x21364000; DSISR=0x42000000; LR=0x9000AFFC; R1=0xBFFFD440; XCP=0x00000030 (0xC00 - System call)
Kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 8.6.0: Tue Mar 7 16:58:48 PST 2006; root:xnu-792.6.70.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC
=============
So it contains Airport... - however I rarely have this problem. The idle freeze happens much more often.
@Jonesy: Thanks for your advice. Even if the Airport card is accessible I wouldn't be keen on disassembling my ibook. I guess I could try to deactivate it for a while though... - I will test it next Monday, when I can use a LAN.
(Yes, my ibook is pretty new. I bought it in May, just before the macbooks came out. I wanted a notebook as small as possible and I'm quite happy with it except for this crash-issue)
Well, I will post again next week when I work without the WLAN, i.e. Airport disabled. I'm pretty curious if my ibook crashes again...
Thanks again for your help. Will keep you up to date!
Cheers,
Naomi
ibook G4   Mac OS X (10.4.6)