Lockups - spinning beachball of DOOOM!

[atebit]

I also have a 13" MacBook with 1GB/80GB. I tried an initial backup via SuperDuper over the weekend to a FW 80GB Seagate drive. At some point in the process (wasn't watching it at the time), the system must have crashed cause I came back to a "gray" screen, and the system was not responsive. After rebooting there was nothing in the syslog, crash log or any SuperDuper application logs to indicate there was a problem. The backup on the FW disk wasn't complete, either.

While I ~was~ wathcing it, I did notice that throughput seemed to be monotonically decreasing, which I wasn't happy about, but maybe that was a symptom of the problem.

Again, love to buy the program if we can figure out what the issue might be.