My MacBook has seen better days. It's a tough old workhorse and has done almost everything I've ever asked it to. Not too long ago, I was dealing with almost daily instances of seeing the "International Screen of Death" which is basically, Mac's answer to Windows' "Blue Screen of Death." It's "international" because it asks you to restart in different languages. Anyway, so I got some good advice to verify permissions and the hard drive in Disk Utility. I did that and things cleared up. I also upgraded to Snow Leopard which didn't seem to make things worse. Then, back in November of '09, I experienced a couple ISDs (International Screen of Death) and noticed that my main hard drive was listed as "failing" in Disk Utility. I prayed to the Computer Gods that it wasn't a bad hard drive, but Disk Utility was telling me it was. I thought about anything new I'd installed, software-wise, that might be causing problems. I'd installed Parallels to test out Windows 7, but that's all I could think of. I Googled around for some answers after getting another ISD. Every forum thread I came across had at least one or two posts explaining it was likely a hardware fault and that I (or the original poster of the thread) should swap out that hard drive ASAP. However, when I looked at their crash reports, I noticed most of them mentioned having Parallels installed. I thought that was a little bizarre, but I didn't have time to monkey around--I was in the middle of National Novel Writing Month--I needed to fix solve my problem, FAST.
Luckily, I had a 500GB pocket drive I was using for backup that I was able to wipe and swap for my MB's original system drive. I did a clean install of Snow Leo and everything seemed to be fine. Eventually, I got around to reinstalling Parallels (which I love) and soon after that, I started getting the ISDs again. Not a lot, maybe once ever week or two. Then, yesterday I got one. I sat down, verified permissions and verified the disk. Disk Utility told me my hard drive need to be repaired. I pop in my OSX install disc and repair the drive. All seemed fine. Then, at 4:18am this morning, MACINCRASH. Ironically, I was backing up files at the time. I restart, reset my backup and go to bed. Wake up today and MACINCRASH--according to the clock on my screensaver, it happened a little more than 2 hours after I went to bed. :(I Google with the phrase "cpu(s) failing to respond to interrupts" and find a few different posts complaining about the same thing. Once again, virtual machine apps are mentioned but most everyone seems to think these are still hardware-related problems. The thing is, each original poster I came across had Parallels installed. Some of them had Parallels AND another VM app, like VMware or VirtualBox. It seems that any VM app installs a kernel extension. I don't know what a "kernel extension" is, but seeing as both waves of ISDs that I experienced this month and back in November came within spitting distance of having installed Parallels, I decided it seemed very likely to be the fault of a kernel extension. So, I decided to uninstall Parallels. So, that's where I am now. We'll see if the Macincrashes stop. I'd understand if the ISDs came during crunching HD video. I'd understand if they came while Parallels was running Win7 in Coherence mode (Coherence mode ROCKS--I honestly LOVE Coherence mode!!), but the ISDs came randomly, while converting files for iPod-playing or, as with last night, during backups. These are not processor-intensive procedures and the odds of me having two bad hard drives *in a row* seem slim. As sad as I am to say good-bye to Parallels (Coherence mode really is awesome!), I really hope this is the reason for my crashes. I really can't afford a new laptop (or even a new HD) right now.
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