Updates installed, Mrs Doc has been using page for about two hours, no crashes, so far so good.
I tried to quantify how many crashes my daughter is experiencing at school. She states that the crashes seem frequent but that is spread over the whole class. She remembers personally having 3 crashes with lost data last semester. She spends 45 min in class and had about 90 classes over the semester which is about 70 class hours. Dividing by three, that is about one crash per 24 hours on the computer.
This was the first hit when I started looking into the problem:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=378337
That is where they recommend reinstalling leopard and iwork.
The next thread I looked at was:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1484288
This is the first place I saw them discussing installing the updates with people verifying that it solved their problem.
Looking in the google tool bar history, I see that the search term was “iwork + crash” “iwork + crashing” “ipage + crashing”
Wish me luck, I stepped away for awhile and my daughter is now using page and so far no crashing for her either after about 3 hours. There were several updates in the que and it looks like they were needed for proper operation of the program.
I bought Mrs Doc a Mac so I would not be doing late night computer trouble shooting. She has one more application to install, hopefully it works and I am out of the Mac IS business once and for all.
Thanks. I think the advice to "reinstall Leopard" was bad advice from someone who really didn't know what they were doing. But the advice to re-install iWork was good advice. The best advice was to do the updates and delete the iWork preferences.
I bought Mrs Doc a Mac so I would not be doing late night computer trouble shooting. She has one more application to install, hopefully it works and I am out of the Mac IS business once and for all.
What's the last thing to install? I might have some advice.
You may have noticed a recommendation to GRRRRR in reply up above. You should do that for your wife as well. That will open 90% of the problem graphics, sound files, and media files that Windows Media format makes difficult because of refusing to release their proprietary file formats. Flip4Mac is free (I think it is now a Microsoft product since they bought out the company that made it).
By the way, it is a good thing to repair permissions both before and after you do a software update.
The other thing you might want to do is to join the FR Mac Ping List. I try to keep everyone posted on latest developments including when it is important to do a Software Update. Let me know if you want on.
Do you have the Mrs. running as an Administrator account or is she set up as a Standard User with a separate Administrator account? If the former, let me know and I will give you the steps to create an administrator account and switch her current account to Standard user. It's the safest way to surf.
I can that the hardware diagnostic disk that comes with the puter can usually (often?) spot bad RAM.
As for your daughter losing data.. “Command S”!!
Tell her whenever you take a think break, long breath, command s - save. Especially while she’s having problems.