Blue Screen of Death on a Mac

iMac

I am getting very annoyed with my iMac at the moment. It is on a too regular basis having a kernel panic and freezing.

The symptoms are that though I can still move the mouse cursor, everything else is frozen, can’t click, right click or use the keyboard.

Generally it happens without me doing anything, though it did happen this morning for the first time with me in front of the computer. I was just scrolling through Safari.

The only solution at the moment is to power down and reboot. The Lion OS does then restore all my applications, but sometimes it corrupts the iPhoto library and this has to be rebuilt.

I actually thought it might be a problem with iPhoto or iTunes, but the most recent episode happened when those two applications weren’t running.

I have done a PRAM reset, and that doesn’t appear to have resolved the issue.

It has only been happening since I upgraded to Lion, but it is happening much more now, five times in the last three days, whereas before it was about once a week.

I am not sure if this is a hardware issue or a software issue. Doesn’t help (typically) that the iMac is now just over three years old and is out of AppleCare.

I am not sure where to go next. I am thinking about upgrading to Mountain Lion to see if that makes a difference, or go back to Snow Leopard.

By the way why is the title of the blog “Blue Screen of Death on a Mac” well when I once tried to sleep the Mac and then moved the mouse to wake it, the result was a blue screen!

Blue Screen on an iMac

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