I'm not sure what may have been the cause, but here are a few things that happened:
- Probably the main thing was Saturday night I came home and turned on both my laptop and my desktop. (FYI - the problem I am currently having is with my laptop.) Both computers freaked out when I turned them on. The Hard drive on my desktop started making an actual physical grinding noise when starting up. It wouldn't start up all the way. The laptop would not start up all the way either. I got to my log in screen, entered my log in info, but it wouldn't finish logging in. A few of the icons appeared in the upper right corner, but no bar at the top. It stopped there. I then realized that my internet was not working. Well, I eventually got both computers functioning again, but to do so, several times I had to manually stop and restart them.
Some other things that happened:
- I forget which app it was, but there was an app that wouldn't quit or force quit, so I had to manually shut down the computer several times.
- logged on to a wireless network at Barnes & Nobles, but only for a few minutes, since I didn't know it wasn't free. It's the only place I've logged on to a wireless network since I reformatted my Hard Drive. Since I have an older Powerbook, I am using the DLink USB wireless adapter. I've had real problems in the past with it making my whole system freeze up. Don't ask me why I still use it.
- Installed a program from a developer. App is called AppStop. I found it in a magazine while at B&N. His URL is
http://developer.mabwebdesign.com/appstop.html. I don't know if perhaps that app caused some problems.
- I also picked up a Practical Web Projects magazine at B&N and browsed the disk that came along with it and installed a bunch of the fonts that were on the disk. Possibly something there was corrupt.
- In order to unzip the fonts, I used stuffit expander. When I did, it said there was a newer version available, version 10, which I downloaded and installed. Every time I tried to use it would just crash. don't know if maybe that was corrupt.