Quirky Macbook Pro After Memory upgrade and big movie project

Question

Hi all,
Last December I made a movie for a class project with imovie. I noticed that the processor temp got up to 180-190 degrees for long periods of time (I use Intel's CoreDuo Temp reader to tell). Ever since then my MBP has been real flaky and weird. I wonder if I burnt the chip or something. Here are some of the issues
Applications crashing (Apple and 3rd party)
hard time finishing big tasks (i.e. they start but then crash towards the end)
major slow downs at odd times
Overall loss of performance
Beachball for no reason
WILL NOT ARCHIVE!!!
WILL NOT TRANSFER BIG FILES TO EXTERNAL HD!!!
(those two are big to me)
I found a great app called fancontrol 1.1 and since then my temps have been down. wish I knew about it before my project. It's as if I can't trust this thing with anything more than surfing the net. Even that has been messed up lately.
I recently bought an extra gig of memory (I used 667 mhz ddr2 sdram bumping it to 2gb total) and that made things worse. Apps and performance are a little more unstable. I then completely wiped the hard drive and reinstalled the OS and all the updates and it still runs noticably slower than when I first got it. Stability got better but not at the level I would expect with 2gb of ram. I barely made it through making a movie yesterday. Had a crash at end of burning the DVD and had to re-render everything.
My biggest fear is that since I have one of the first Macbook Pros (I was one of the waitlist people) that I am screwed out of my warranty. I think it expires sometime this month. I use this thing everyday and I can't afford to upgrade. I'm pretty savy with macs and I've done about everything I can. Any advice or insight will be much apreciated.
MacBook Pro 1.83 ghz 2gb Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Answer 1

Among other things: Have you performed the firmware updates required for your particular model?
Have you run diagnostics? Boot from the OS X Installer Disc One and after the chime press and hold down the "D" key until the diagnostic screen appears. Run the extended tests several times.
Check that you have properly installed the added RAM. It's quite easy to insert it improperly. Remove the new RAM module to see if the problems cease. If they do you have a defective module.
Under heavy load it's not uncommon for the CPU core temperature to reach 83-85 ºC. Normal idle temperature may range between 40-45 ºC.
Otherwise, take the computer to an Apple service center for service.
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