Hi, i recently received a second hand mac. I tried turning it on, max os x puma loads up and all i get is a blank blue screen with a cursor then it crashes. Sometimes it crashes on loading or says that it has to be restarted. I purchased os x leopard. Does anyone know what the problem with the mac might be? I have no idea what the previous user did to it. Maybe the hard drive was formatted or it was a part of a network. I'm quite new to macs so if anyone could help it would be very much appreciated. Do you think i could format the hard drive and start from scratch with leopard without logging in? thanks for the help

If it is Puma, then it is version 10.1 which is very old now. Did you check that the machine supports Leopard? Follow the instructions here to access Disk Utility from your Leopard DVD: http://kb.wisc.edu/helpdesk/page.ph... When you open Disk Utility, instead of repair, you want to Erase the disk. Do a quick format, make sure HFS+ Journaled is selected. Then quit Disk Utility, and follow the on-screen steps to install Leopard onto the hard drive.

wackymacs is right. you really should upgrade ASAP. There are security holes in 10.1 that would make it unsafe to use online. YES Macs have security holes but they are patched fairly quickly. It's not advisable to use any OS X before Tiger.