It keeps locking up! I have to Cmd+Ctrl+power it to get it to reboot. What's wrong with it?

Please note that I will not give up on my poor sweet Macintosh. I can't afford anything else.

In what way does it lock up? Is it a plain screen freeze and no movement, not even the cursor? Or is there screen anomalities such as pixellation and/or breaking up etc. involved?

That might be an indication of hardware problems, such as faulty memory, faulty motherboard, faulty video...or the hard drive, even though apparently now resurrected with DW, might be toast and acting up.

Sometimes a clean install of the OS can help, too, if it is just a sw problem, especially in the case of classic OS, (OS 9 and earlier). But first, I'd run the Apple Hardware Tester fully, if you have it.

Yeah, can you provide more information as to what it is doing when it locks up?

Is it an application? Finder?

Can you not force quit the offender?

Oh, and specs please. Which TiBook, how much ram (and is that Apple Ram or from some place else), which OS, etc.

I'm still thinking there is a hardware problem. Is it launching apps and opening files normally, or does it seem to take longer than it should sometimes (my wife's previous iMac did that just before her HD died). Considering the problems you were having before this week, that HD may be going bad.

Mac OS X 10.3
256 MB RAM (i think)
550 mHz G4
Gigabit Ethernet model
18.63 (20) GB HD wirh 5.5 GB left

The apps launch fine. It's pretty fast. rarely do I get the beachball.

What it does when it locks up: It's not 1 particlar app, I can be doing something in iTunes, Finder, etc. and the cursor and nothing else moves. If it was making a sound at that time it throws that sound into a loop. That's all I can think of now.

It really needs much more RAM for starters. I'm still thinking there is a problem with the HD. The freezes as you describe seem to be related to reading/writing virtual memory, which it will be doing nearly constantly with only 256 MB RAM.

Where cam you buy Tibook ram? and the chime sounds kind of fuzzy, but everything else is fine. Are HDs expensove? I really don't want to give up on my Tibook.

Try here for RAM.

OWC has better prices on RAM. I'd recommend 2x512MB (1 GB) as a minimum which is the max for that machine. They also have HDs. I'm wondering if these TiBooks had the same HD volume limitation that my G4 tower had - 128GB max. If so, the largest drive you should consider is 120GB.

NewEgg has better drive deals. These are the 80GB models.