MAC guys...some help please

Gresh · #1 02-01-2006, 10:40 AM

My iMAC is driving me nutso. It's a G5 running OS X Panther and it has all the latest version updates, haven't upgraded to Tiger yet, but maybe I need to.

Every time I sit down with it, I get the beachball treatment...you know, the spinning pinwheel of death. I've repaired permissions with the disk utility first aid and I've run the hardware checks with the startup disk and everything checks out. After repairing permissions, it sort of runs better and cooperates for a while, maybe a day or two, but then inevitably I'm back to where I started. The other night I had to force shut down 3 times and iTunes would never open at all.

Anybody got any ideas, should I buy the Tiger upgrade and see if that fixes it or is this something that even that won't address. I haven't spent a lot of time on the apple forums looking for answers...yet. Those folks are just scary. If Tiger would fix it, I'd buy it in a quick minute, but I've heard about software compatibility issues with iLife packages and Tiger...but maybe they've got all that worked out by now.

ibanezcollector · #2 02-01-2006, 11:23 AM

I run Tiger and have never had a single issue, I also never had a problem with panther either.

What are you trying to do? or is it just doing it all the time?

Need a little more info.

Gresh · #3 02-01-2006, 11:43 AM

It happens all the time, it doesn't seem to be caused by one particular application. I can just be surfing the web and then try to do something else and it locks up, spinning beachball. Try to force quit and it won't, try to restart and it won't...last night it sat on the blue screen for like 20 minutes after I thought it was going to restart properly after a soft restart. Lately this has happened as much as 3 times in as many hours, it just seems to hang up on normal operations. Like I said, I'm running panther and I've got 756 MB of memory.

Last night I woke it up like normal, tried to open iTunes and it did nothing. I could do other things, just not iTunes. It acted like it would open by putting the little black arrow under the icon, and when I tried to force quit it wouldn't remove the arrow. Went to force quit again and it said iTunes not responding. Tried to soft reboot, and it said I needed to quit iTunes which it wouldn't let me do so I had to do a hard reboot. It sometimes hangs up like this when trying to watch streaming video, it just sits there forever doing nothing. I've got 3meg pipeline service so it should be a rocket ship.

I'm new to Apples so I hope this is fixable. If I'm not giving you the right sort of info, please guide me to what you might want to know about specifically. Thanks for your help.

ibanezcollector · #4 02-01-2006, 12:04 PM

ok well this is one option Restore LOL.. I know its not the best option but something is going on there. If you restored the disk permissions its not that.

is it possible to take a screenshot of your running applications so we can see what you got going on? It seems like something is conflicting somewhere causing either a major memory leak or maxing the cpu out which is causing it to just lock up or take years for a process to work.

Gresh · #5 02-01-2006, 12:48 PM

I'll dork around with it some more tonight and see if I can look at the activity monitor while it's having problems...hopefully it'll let me see it while other things are happening. Assume I can just drag it up in a corner of the screen and leave it there while I'm futzing about in other apps.

Thanks

Gresh · #6 02-01-2006, 12:50 PM

Oh yeah, it has also completely shut down on me, the screen goes to a black and white/grey version of whatever is running and the label pops up saying I need to restart the computer. It's done this probably five or six times in last 6 months.

I'd hate to be recording something and have that happen as all of it would be lost...

zEr0 · #7 02-01-2006, 01:15 PM

That's funny, I also bought an iMac recently and I had THE SAME problems you are experiencing. I was pretty pissed since I am a new Mac user, but I must admit the AppleCare guys were really helpful. It turned out being quite a serious fault with the Logic card and I had to take it to the repairing shop but since the unit was under warranty I didn't pay a dime. They took a few weeks to sort it out but I haven't had another problem since. I am very pleased with mine so far.

I suggest you also contact AppleCare and they will tell you what to do.

Hope that helps.

darren wilson · #8 02-01-2006, 01:55 PM

That dark screen and the message saying you have to reboot is called a kernel panic. That means something deep down in the core layers of the operating system is tripping over itself. Could be a hardware problem or a software problem.

Which application seems to give you the spinning beachball when you launch it?

I've had problems with corrupt fonts that caused MS Office to bomb every time i launched it. Some third-party software, particularly system preference hacks, can wreak havoc with your system.

Jemwielder · #9 02-01-2006, 02:04 PM

You might want to consider getting disk warrior. It's a helpful utility that often helps with such things. Mainly because the hard drive is a bit garbled or something of that nature. I'd recommend this program to anyone who uses a mac. Problems with a mac are usually rare but when it happens it usually plays for keeps. You can also always talk to apple care. they are very helpful and speak english as their primary language.

Gresh · #10 02-01-2006, 05:35 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by zEr0

That's funny, I also bought an iMac recently and I had THE SAME problems you are experiencing. I was pretty pissed since I am a new Mac user, but I must admit the AppleCare guys were really helpful. It turned out being quite a serious fault with the Logic card and I had to take it to the repairing shop but since the unit was under warranty I didn't pay a dime. They took a few weeks to sort it out but I haven't had another problem since. I am very pleased with mine so far.

I suggest you also contact AppleCare and they will tell you what to do.

Hope that helps.

Wouldn't the hardware test have found that and noted it...my run of the hardware test showed no errors or issues...unless that is something that slips below the radar. I'm going to try to repair the disk, not just the permissions tonight. If that doesn't work then I'll get Diskwarrior, then Applecare guys here I come. This blows.

**jemsite** · #11 02-01-2006, 05:40 PM

here's the obligatory.... dump it and get a Windows XP PC

i'd google around for info before purchasing anything to "fix" this myself ...glen

Gresh · #12 02-01-2006, 05:58 PM

I've got one....it's no better.

zEr0 · #13 02-01-2006, 06:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gresh

Wouldn't the hardware test have found that and noted it...my run of the hardware test showed no errors or issues...unless that is something that slips below the radar. I'm going to try to repair the disk, not just the permissions tonight. If that doesn't work then I'll get Diskwarrior, then Applecare guys here I come. This blows.

Well, not necesairily. When my iMac had problems I had to run Hardware Test several times and I once got a Hard disk error and another time a Video Ram error. However, it turned out to be a Logic card (whatever that is...) error and they only found that out when I took it for maintenance. I also run DIsk Utility many times and it seemed to help the issue but after a few days the disturbance would be back.

HOnestly dude, if your unit is under warranty just call AppleCare and if they can't help you over the phone just send it for repair. I know it's a pain in the ass but I know that when I tried to fix it myself I got absolutely nowhere.

Jeroenn · #14 02-02-2006, 06:46 AM

See if a fresh install helps. If not, it's probably a hardware error like suggested above.
FWIW, my mac (with Tiger) has crashed fully only once since the 4/5 months that I have it now and a reboot was all it needed to get it started again. More over, the cause of the crash was found and fixed with an update that came available the next day.
Unlike the various windows systems I have here (including XP) that crash on a regular basis and can be brought to a screeching halt with the crash of a single application. MS just can touch the stability of OSX ever, so the hint to dump it in favor of XP would be inadvisable.

J

jay ratkowski · #15 02-02-2006, 08:03 AM

I had a similar problem back in my Mac days. Every likely solution pointed to a hardware issue. I did fresh installs, ran with only the OS-included software for a while, etc. Except when I started pulling hardware, the problem was still there. My problem coincided with the release of OS9.2, so I determined that it was just a complete junk release and I dumped my Mac.

However, I would go through and start removing hardware. Start with what you added most recently (be it memory, a new video card, a USB device, whatever) and put in the original part if there is one. Hopefully as you do that, you'll find whatever is screwing you up.

Oh and before Glen/Jeroenn start another useless battle... I just wanted to let everyone know that I use XP and OSX regularly, and they both suck. And for you 3rd party weirdos, Linux is soooo much worse. So you can all just shut up.