My MacBook Air dies while Google Docs is offline

I've been a proponent of the Cloud and hosted applications for quite some time but today I am dramatically feeling the effects of having zero control over my infrastructure and the inability to get anything when a Cloud provider has issues.

My MacBook Air is clearly in it's death-throes just six months after purchase and today Google Docs was down for over an hour. I basically have no way to do any real work at this point as I can't use most of my applications and can't get to my documents on Google. I'm a living example of the limitations of the Cloud as well as the beautiful but unreliable nature of Apple hardware.

On the MBA, the CPU is maxing itself out with only one or two applications open and doesn't seem too thrilled when I attempt to force-quit running applications. It takes about 90 seconds for the dialog box to even pop up and let me try to quit an app. It then takes a solid 30 seconds for the application to actually quit. I have to reboot every 30 minutes or so to get back to a workable condition and then wait for the CPU to max out again.

[discern]

What would cause the CPU to peg? Software, most likely.

[royrusso]

You need to upgrade your laptop: http://www.dell.com/

[jackdaniels08]

Mr. Dave Rosenberg, Google Gears is available for Macs which allows you to do work offline and then syncs when you go online. If Google Docs is down online you would be able to work offline with Google Gears as a back up. This is useful when you are out of range of internet access, like say when you are on an airplane.

[eduardgrebe]

Surely what you describe on the MBA is a software problem? I'm no defender of Apple, but on every platform I've used, OSes have become unstable at times. Like with a Windows situation, perhaps even consider reinstalling the system?

[daverosenberg]

I would assume it's a software problem but I can't seem to nail down any specific app that is causing the problems.