application crashes on my new/2nd hand Mac

[Artemisia]

hi -

hope someone can help... i recently bought a 2nd hand G4 iBook, which looks like it has had OSX 10.3.5 recently (clean) installed.

it's a fine lil' laptop only it is PRONE to highly annoying application crashes - particularly with Safari and Word (which I installed).

what is my best course of action to fix this? i haven't really put much new stuff on here yet, so i could do a totally clean wipe/install whatever you call it just to make sure it was all done right.

would that help (and if so, any tips on how to do it), or is there a less drastic answer?

thanks so much -

 

[Egidio]

According to Apple, occasionally the user permissions associated with files or applications become damaged, which can prevent a file or application from working as it should. See this article. So, you might want to try to run Disk Utility (Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility). Open the application, select the mounted volume for your hard drive and click "repair disk permissions."