EMac freezing

Hello,
I have an eMac which I have updated to Tiger. I never had a problem before...now my computer freezes whenever it feels like it. I called Apple and did the utilities repair...I also reinstalled Tiger. I know that I do need to add some memory, but I guess my question is more about the logic board problems.
Could it be that I am starting to have those problems now? I looked at my eMac's ID G84284EFQJ8 bought 7/31/04. It looks to me like it falls under the numbers for a possible problem. Of course, the 3 years is just up...Would Apple still repair my computer? Also, does anyone know if they will come to the house? I can NOT carry this eMac into the Mall, let alone to the car. I am getting very frustrated.
Also, does anyone know if running videos on "youtube" and "myspace" load slower with a lack of memory or is that a possible connection/airport problem? My airport shows that it is running fully.
Thank you so much. I am a Mac fan....we use them at school. I just don't know what the heck to do....
Janice

Contact a nearby Apple Authorized Service Provider (AASP) and give them the serial number only of your eMac, along with reporting the random freezing, and ask if they can arrange repair under the eMac Repair Extension Program for Video and Power Issues. Cosmichobo has pointed out in another thread that the three years is beginning to expire; if past experience is any indication, Apple's service providers will cut you as much slack as they can, if you ask nicely (and don't take out the fristration of a balky computer on them!). If you provide them with a valid reason why you can't get the eMac to the repair location, they may be able to help arrange pickup. You may need to call Apple Customer Relations (800) 767-2775 if the local repair providers don't have the authority to make such a pickup.
It's not clear how much RAM memory your computer has; check under the Apple menu's "About This Mac" for the (RAM) memory. to run OS X 10.4, you really want a minimum of 512 MB RAM; 640 is quite usable, and more up to the eMac maximum of 1 GB is always better. If you're running on 256 MB RAM, then anything other than Text Edit is going to be painfully slow. Wait until you can get the capacitor / logic board repair done, then is necessary you can either pay the repair shop to install more RAM for you, or do so yourself using Crucial to select the RAM and eMac - Do-It-Yourself for installation instructions. You can determine how your RAM is implemented (one 256 MB DIMM? Two 128 MB DIMMs?) bu going to Apple Menu -> About This Mac -> More Info to bring up System Profiler, then look under the "Hardware" heading for Memory and click on that.
One more thought: If you normally shut down an OS X Mac overnight or leave it in system sleep, the cron maintenance tasks cannot run in their nominal 3 am timeframe. (Display-only sleep allows the maintenance tasks to run). Tiger 10.4.2 and later will (nominally) force the maintenance tasks to run after sufficient time has elapsed, although the timing on that is subject to dispute. You can leave the Mac in display-only sleep a weekend or two a month; you can manually Force Background Maintenance; or you can use a third-party utility such as OnyX to run the maintenance. Note that any system utility you use must be compatible with the OS version (e.g., use the Tiger version of OnyX with 10.4.x). Also note that the weekly cron task can take a fairly lengthy amount of time to finish; don't interrupt whatever tool you ise to run it until it's done it's work.

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EMac freezes randomly, open window turns into broken up jibber

My eMac freezes randomly, open window turns into broken up jibber (kinda looks like I put a photoshop filter on it or something). I can't force quit when it does this, no error message, I've repaired permissions. Any ideas?

This doesn't help. but my first thought on seeing your picture was 'addressing bit failure in the video memory'. Unfortunately, as you already know, the video 'card' on the eMac is a chipset mounted to the logic board, and the only repair I'm aware of is replacement. An Apple Service Provider could give you an estimate but unless your eMac is still within the standard one-year hardware warrenty or you purchased the three-year ApplceCare extended warrenty, that's not an attractice cost-benefit tradeoff.
On the chance that I'm wrong and it's some unusual system corruption, look again for the Hardware Test disc. It can be tricky figuring out where it is; on early eMacs it was always a separate CD, on recent eMacs it's a partition on the Restore DVD, and on models in between, it depends on whether the OS X Install disc was on a DVD or not. You might try booting from your OS X Install or Restore disc using Startup Manager to see if Hardware Test is on a partition.
If nothing else, booting off the OS X Install disk (as if you were going to run Disk Utility > Repair Disk to check the drive) should further confirm if the problem is in the video hardware rather than in the hard drive's OS: if the broken display appears when booted from the OS X Install disc, it's pretty certainly the video hardware.

Emac freeze screen and pixels

i have an emac on 10.3.9 and it started having pixel problems, where when you dragged a box around the screen some pixels would freeze. now when you drag a window around the whole emac freezes.
it doesent seem to happen when i boot up in a safe boot.
does anyone know what this is a sign of and how i fix it?
thanks,
p.

The eMac has a CRT, not an LCD, therefore there are no pixels. It sounds like the video driver has been corrupted, and unfortunately the only way to remedy this is by doing an archive and install of the system.
Plus, you haven't said which model you have or how much RAM. It could be a sign of low memory coupled with a system problem.

EMac Freezes in Normal Start Up - OK under Safe Boot 10.3.9 or 10.4.11

In helping a charter school get its eMacs back running, one of these eMacs [(ATI Graphics w/32Mb VRAM), 1.25GHz G4, 37GB HD, 1Gb RAM, and whose SN = G8429CDSQJ8] is displaying very unusual symptoms. It simply has to be software or a very weird RAM or VRAM memory issue, but I am mystified as to whose since I found no Firmware Updates at Apple or ATI. Here is the gory story.
I had replaced its battery and added a 1Gb DIMM (About This Mac and System Profiler show this is OK). I repaired the HD from a “Gray Restore DVD that was shipped with these eMacs” (got a “No Repairs Needed” from this) and its Permissions from the DVD set of 10.3.x system SW, and initially did an "archive and restore" installation. This had worked fine for all the other 10 eMacs as had going up to 2 Gb RAM.
On re-start the eMac froze and refused to eject Restore DVD. I hooked up a Firewire Cable to the ailing machine and ejected the Restore DVD after starting the ailing eMac in Target Mode. After this, I started up in Safe Boot and updated the 10.3.x Restored SW to 10.3.9 using Software Update ... things seemed fine. So, I started up in normal mode, opened System Preferences to Accounts to make sure the Student account was under agreed restrictions. As soon as the Authentication panel opened, the eMac froze, needing a Power Button shutdown … it kept doing this, and it behaved itself under Safe Boot after each freeze. I installed YASU (from a CD in Safe Boot and have used for years on my home PMMD, dual 1Ghz G4, 10.4.11), which I understand is simply a group of Unix scripts under a nice GUI and had it do all the system and web browser tasks (i.e. crons, permissions, prebinding, swap filesetc) but saved the logs and their archives.
We were upgrading all the eMacs System SW to Os 10.4.11 (starting from a 10.4.3 "Black X" commercial system disk … so from a Safe Boot, I loaded the 10.4.3 DVD, started up from it, and did an Erase and Install, so all the SW on the drive is Apple’s own. PRAM was reset and amazingly, on this re-start, this eMac froze a few seconds after a App’s window opened. From a new Safe Boot, Software Update took me to 10.4.11 (I refused to allow Safari, iTunes and Quick Time update until it had also updated all the other security and Java (9 Javas of these in numerical order from SUD).
Under Safe Boot, I found I can open as many as 10 Apps or Utilities, flip between the windows … nothing wrong. After some thought, I used Activity Monitor, Disk Utility (to perform “Erase Free Space, 7X” and with Screen Saver’s Flurry at maximum in the Choice window, and this places the processor use at almost 100% (~70-75% user + ~20% system) … but this does not test much of the memory (couldn’t figure out how to do this). I kept things going for over 7 hours while randomly using Safari or Text Edit. But as soon as a Normal Restart is done and a second window opens (even Activity Monitor’s little floater), it freezes again.
The Web is full of symptoms that usually blame memory, but it seems hard to believe that the 1Gb DIMM would “know” when the system is booted Normal vs Safe. So, tonight, I am going to run Rember (v. o.2b) that I dragged off my PMMD … an have used it under 10.4.11 over the years.
BTW, contents of Trash after two (2) hard freezes are always the same system files [annex_aux, annex.db, filetoken.db, fonts.db, and qdfams.db]. The mention of “fonts.db” seems to suggest a font problem, but why … all are fresh 10.4.3 stuff.
It’s my understanding that Safe Boot allows ONLY Apple extensions and Apps to load and this is why it seems to me that the problem must be SW … somehow, somewhere.
Is there a utility that can list third party components? Does this make sense? In looking into the Preferences and Application Support there are Adobe, Macromedia prefs, fonts … which I assume came in w/ Safari since I have not added any 3rd party programs other than YASU, who tells you truthfully where its stuff is loaded
When back at the school, I plan to swap out 1Gb RAM DIMMs and/or replace the old 256Mb DIMM that was original. Also, plan to go back to the Restore Software DVDs (10.3.4 since these have more Apps that are needed): Erase (Zero Out Deleted Files) and Install to rebuild a “virgin” set of 10.3 after restarting. Then Check to see if Safe Boot is stable BEFORE trying to update to 10.4.11 (via 10.4.3 Black X).
However, if this does not make sense, I would be grateful for readers pointing out my errors and/or flawed plans.

Hi Cosmic (and, per my Southern US heritage, hope yawl are doin fine down under),
Firstly, thank you hugely for guiding me through this eMac puzzle. Your insight that under Safe Boot the ATI video extensions are turned off now has the symptoms I see matching a cause.
Last evening, I did an Erase (Zero out the HD, 1 pass) and a virgin , custom install from the eMac Media DVD that came with the machine; this took the system to Os 10.3.6, and it seemed to let me open more windows than two(2) for several passes, but it still froze, these times leaving no recovered files as a trail.
I decided to use only Apple’s Software Update, under Safe Boot, to sequentially load only system or Java UDs and not let Safari or any iApp stuff bring in foreign SW components(tis strategy caused by finding, last evening, strange troubles with the Font book not validating any font and it displaying most of these incorrectly. This font finding kept me thinking SW had to be the problem instead of heeding your and Alan Jones experience …
All well and good, and when I got to 10.3.9 with all the Java and Security Uds, I could open as many as 4 Apps, but the killer was always testing the “Flurry” screen saver … lots of video here. Yet in Safe Boot, I could open all the Apps in the folder and randomly switch between them with no issues.
Lot of driving chores today kept me from seeing your second reply till late this afternoon, but as I drove I remembered that on my now ancient Power Mac Mirror Door, 2x1Ghz, one of my partitions had 10.3.9 loaded with free Unix scientific SW and Xbench 1.1.3 and Cinebench 2003, both of which test video cards, etc. So, I loaded and made DVDs of these testing apps after running them on the PMMD in the 10.3 partition as well as my normal 10.4.11 main drive. Got them over on the eMac, checked to make sure its fonts were OK, ran the tests under Safe Boot, then saw immediate freezes under Normal Boots, and finally, logged into the Apple site and read your reasoning. Bingo!
I again checked the caps I could see and they matched your ID of them, still, even with a machinists mirror could not see the ones further in … called the school marm and told her we should consider this eM as nearly dead, use its internal organs (HD, RAM, ATA drive) and externals (Keyboards, cables) in our organ donor program. She’s agreed, so it’s a done deal.
So, tomorrow I’ll satisfy my curiosity and do the surgery to remove the innards and see if there is evidence of the caps … sure there will be. BTW, I made my living, till a good severance package induced early retirement , as a PhD level Materials Scientist/Elec Engineer (mostly in chip level packaging and several forays into flat panel electronic displays (LCDs and OLEDS(Orgainc Light Emitting Diodes)). As I looked at the circuit board, these electrolytics seem to be surface mounted, an unusual design even for its day, and I cannot imagine any “shade tree” electrician having much success trying to replace them.
Again, a thank you for your insight. I’ll just have to owe you a beer since I’m doubtful you would get one I’d drop along the seashore. Take good care … and without checking a map, I hope Brisbane is not being flooded.
drsax
PS I forgot to mark your and Allan Jones earlier replies as Helpful which they were ... just did so. Sorry for the oversight. Owe you both a beer for sharing your experience.

Emac freeze outside repair serial #

My 2 year old emac is freezing constantly. I have run disk warrior, tech tool pro, and disk utilities via fire wire from a lap top and a G5. In addition to doing a total reinstall of the os. The emac will freeze if i try to run disk utilities from its own applications. I even took it to the mac store after the power button failed due to having to turn it on and off to unfreeze it. Apple assured me with an OS reinstall that it would be fine that all the hard ware was A-OK. Well a 2 year old machine that has not been loaded with huge programs or abused in any way should preform so poorly. I wounder if there are other folks out side the repair program serial #s that have the freeze up problems.

jerzydude1...
"I have run disk warrior, tech tool pro, and disk utilities via fire wire from a lap top and a G5."
There is an old saying that "too many cooks spoil the broth". The same goes for running so many high end utilities on a Mac, as they do their jobs so much differently. Recurring headaches are no fun.
I suspect your issue is related to system memory, so can you post back your memory configuration?
Any abnormal HD noise?
If it is the ATI video chipset that is a pricy logic board replacement. It would seem that the Apple facility should have cought that one on the first try.
...Ron

EMac Freeze still

I find myself in the same boat as those using these 1.25 Ghz eMac's, and getting very frustrated.
I find this to be quite a puzzler, have tried all sensible propsects to bring this to a conclusion.Yes, it started with the appearence of "the unrepairable permissions". Even if it involves changing the logic board.... I'm in this for the distance. Everybody that I 've seen responding have reported that this trouble BEGAN approx. 1 month ago. Me too. The January sotware update seems to have instigated this trouble. My computing world was on quite an even keel until THAT update was made. NO freezing = smooth running OS X.3.9 right up to that point.
Have attempted MANY suggested "work-arounds". Ran Apps to isolate = to no avail!! (all is well) Ran applejack, ran memtest. Update ATI driver
Yes, it does appear to get better just after running the radeon ATI updater. But, it still froze while saving a edit to a 3 meg AIFF file with SoundStudio this morning.
I'll be watching the discussions for the days to come, it sure looks as if there are quite a few folks out there in this mess.........

I've noticed that some one has said the answer has been found....
in the "using your eMac" forum area, the star is applied to the posting about the freezing video display.... ???
So, what ? is it some kind of general consensus that the logic board replacement must be what the answer is?
I've read thru all the responses several times, I can only assume that this is what somebody figured is the reason and said "yep, there's the answer !"
I guess all I can do is , STILL, register my complaint with Apple and keep hoping.
The freezing up has improved dramatically after udating the ATI Radeon video (drivers?)....crap
Where as I would freeze several (20 to 30 times) daily, today I have had only 2 happen today. (so, far) I'll be checking the Olympics this evening, we'll see what happens then.

Regular eMac freezing issue.

My issue is similar to the previous post of Glenn2, yet slightly different.
Whenever the computer starts up, normally after login and opening of a couple of applications, namely iTunes, mail, and safari; it is caused to freeze randomly, often it will be the ability to move or close frames that is 'lost' first, then the rotating pinwheel sometimes will appear and then finally the whole thing will freeze e.g. no mouse use, no keyboard input.
Could this be a problem caused by my 7.11GB of space available or a virus, or similar issue?
Any help would be appreciated greatly.

Hi,
It may well (as previously noted) be you need more RAM. You should have at least 512 MB. Applications that are being
updated are more and more resource hogs. The eMac USB only came with a 32 MB VRAM
card, so it can be a little slow on the graphics. Like iPhoto, printing arts, and games.
1.) I also suggest you regularly trash your Caches folder. Located in Home/Library/Caches
2.) Run Disk Repair from your Software Install DVD 1, with the Disc in the drive start up holding down the "C" key. Select Disk Utility from the Title Bar Menu, Select your Start up volume and run it a couple times and run it on your HD too.
Let your eMac sleep for a while sometimes to cool down too.
There are a few really choice sites to help you with maintainance and tips:
like: http://www.lowendmac.com/
http://www.macfixit.com/
http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html

EMac freeze GUI

Hi,
two days ago my eMac with Superdrive, after boot and login, was completely unresponsive: there wasn't screen artifact, the mouse and keyboard was unresponsive.
Now restarting the computer the gui is continuing to freeze after some time of use but I can move the mouse.
The emac's serial number is in the range for the repair program but I still hope that it's a software problem.
emac is running osx 10.5.4
Can somene give me advices?
Thanks!

I have noticed that often the problem occurs when I lunch apps, for examples activity monitor: the icon do a half jump and then gui is freezed.
Making the log-in via ssh to emac the processes that use more cpu are: mdworker, mds, syslogd, ATSServer.
From top:
Processes: 63 total, 3 running, 1 stuck, 59 sleeping... 216 threads 13:17:41
Load Avg: 0.57, 1.09, 1.07 CPU usage: 38.38% user, 2.02% sys, 59.60% idle
SharedLibs: num = 2, resident = 74M code, 0 data, 5288K linkedit.
MemRegions: num = 6521, resident = 159M + 24M private, 122M shared.
PhysMem: 132M wired, 460M active, 35M inactive, 636M used, 388M free.
VM: 3396M + 132M 94700(0) pageins, 0(0) pageouts
Message was edited by: Filippo Rossi

EMac freezes some times

Hallo,
I've got an eMac g4 700, and it freezes randomly, when the Apple logo apears when I start up, or when I just start it and using it.
I tried many things but nothing seems to help, pram nvram everything.
Some people say it maid be the videocard, but I dont think so, the eMac is not working anymore so I have to start up with by presing a key and to select my hard disk, which key I don't know at the moment, but then it don't freezes my mouse is working then hours only when i selected my operating system after a while or by th start up or when i'm using it, it stops.
What problem could this be?
Thanks

Hello,
Do you have an AirPort Card Installed? If so, try to Remove it then fully seat it again this time, Make SURE that the card is completely seated by pushing it in until the 50 pound Mac starts to slide away from you on the desk. (I too have the original 700MHz eMac (Now Overclocked to 900MHz for more than 1.5 years now and still running beautifully fast) and had the same issue, but when I re-inserted the AirPort Card, it completely went away and never returned.)
Regards,
Your Fellow eMac User,
Matthew Knice

EMac Freeze on 'waiting for local disks' startup bar

hello!
my emac is starting up completely normally except when the startup bar gets to "waiting for local disks", where it freezes, although i do have control of the mouse when this happens. i left my computer on all day (maybe 11 hours) and when i returned, it was still in this state. restarting the computer without an ethernet cable results in the same issue.
is there anything else i can be doing to fix this? i didn't think this would be much of an issue, so i haven't done anything besides restart without the ethernet cable. please help!

nevermind! i had a corrupt DataTraveler® 2 GB usb attached to it during startup... removed that and it works fine

EMac Freeze

My eMac has started randomly freezeing up. It has happened under different conditions with differet software running. When it happens, everything locks up except the cursor; it will still move but does nothing. I have to use the power button to restart. I tried reinstalling 10.4 and have updated to 10.4.4. I have also zapped the pram. Help!!!!

I am also having this issue on eMacs, exactly as you describe.
Sometimes the system locks up right after login, sometimes it'll take a while. Always seems to be after login, tho, with network or local account.
running 10.4.6 on a lab of 24 eMacs. Several have shown this problem. It has only cropped up in the last few weeks (since 10.4.5, perhaps)

Emac freezes up all the time

our emac all of the sudden started freeziong up. i thought it was ichat so i deleted it, but it wasnt. so now it still freezes and I need to know how to reinstall ichat. please help

Any question about sudden freezing has to include a check of your eMac serial number against those cited in eMac Repair Extension Program for Video and Power Issues.
Also crucial: how much free space is there on the hard drive?
Is performance improved when you Start Up in Safe Mode?
You'll want to look over the tips in Travis A. - Regular Maintenance / General Troubleshooting.

EMac Freezes while running Diskwarrior! What Did I Do Wrong?

I just purchased Diskwarrior upon the suggestion of several people here, and decided to try it out. I booted up from the DiskWarrior CD, and followed instructions. It said HD was ready to rebuild and I clicked on that. It went for awhile and then just froze. I had to turn the power off to get out of the program and back to my my startup disk.
What did I do wrong? Is there more to installing it than just booting up from the CD? I need some great advice! Thanks.

Janice,
You're certain DW really froze? It takes typically about 45 minutes to process a half-full 40 GB HD on my 700 MHz eMac, and at some parts of the run it does appear as if the progress bar isn't moving, but it does come back to update the screen eventually.
The only times I can recall reports of Disk Warrior failing all ended up being traced to hardware failure of one kind or another (bad RAM in particular). What version of Disk Warrios do you have? The version number will be printed on the DW CD. Since your profile shows OS X 10.3.9, through, any DW recently purchased from Alsoft should work with your Mac. Have you checked the disc for smudges or scratches?
Dig out your Apple Hardware Test (AHT) disc and see if your Mac will boot from that and if so what it says about the optical drive. You may need to run a CD lens cleaner through the drive one or two passes. Also have AHT check the RAM; you can also use Memtest.
The other thing that comes to mind is to try DW with all peripherals other than keyboard and mouse disconnected.

Emac freezes on mac osx screen after upgrade

I recently bought the new keyboard and downloaded the upgrade through the apple website. My System update started at the same time and it upgraded the most recent iphoto and osx powerpc update. Im running tiger on my emac and it was fine till I re-started. When it starts back up, the screen goes to the screen with the grey apple and then proceeds to the screen where the chrome mac osx is about to start up but it just sits there. I tried booting up with safe mode but it doesn't do anything and I tried starting it up doing the shift/command/option/delete and that doesn't do anything as well.
Did any of the updates cause this problem and if so, how do I get into my computer to fix this if it won't let me in with all the reboot options. Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks
M

Same boat as miQ: This eMac (1.42GHz, 512MB RAM) hangs at blue screen after Apple logo/gear and before startup progress bar. Tried reformat/zero then install Panther, but machine will not boot from Panther install disk (produces broken Apple logo and hangs). Erase/reformat and install Tiger = OK, but machine only boots in SafeMode (normal boot = blue screen). Started with 10.4.0 and updated to 10.4.11 by restarting in SafeMode with updates, no change. Disk Utility = all good (in SafeMode).
Lost audio somewhere along the way, too: No startup tone, Sound Prefs say no output device detected, mute is checked and unavailable, sound menu vanishes from menubar when clicked. (Speakers are built-in and connected, just as they were when we started.)
Boots in SafeMode, works as expected, but normal startup hangs at blue screen, 100% of the time. While 512MB RAM isn't much these days (2x256 verified), it should be enough for a fresh install and OS only, no? Firmware issue? (Won't boot from Panther or OS9.) Boots into Startup Manager (w/option key) and shows internal HDD: Then, Apple logo, gear, and blue screen, as usual. Goes to sleep eventually, then refuses to wake. Logic board? Sure acts like a software issue.....
Any suggestions/ideas/clues would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Mike

EMac freezes during start-up

Please help!! Last night my emac was doing a "security update" and I was using Safari at the same time. My camera was also plugged in. I tried to open IPhoto and everything froze (I couldn't even force quit anything). Since then I cannot get the computer to start. It gets to the white screen with the gray apple and the little spinning "thinking" wheel. But this is as far as it gets. I tried starting in Safe Mode - same result. I tried holding the option key while starting. I can see the icon and the arrows, but my mouse pointer is a spinning watch and I can't select anything. Does anyone know what else to do?
Thanks,
Erin

Hello Erin and Welcome to Apple Discussions!
Have you repaired your Disk Permissions lately? If not, this could be a cause of your problems with the eMac. Also, next time you do use a Software Update, try not to have any applications open becuase it could all mess it up (as you have discovered). I'm gonna try to help you with your eMac,
#1. Insert the first Mac OS X CD or DVD
#2. Reboot your eMac while holding down the "C" key.
#3. When and if the main menu shows up, go up to options and select Disk Utility. Repair both your permissions and your hard drive.
#4. Reboot the eMac while holding the mouse button down (this will eject the CD).
Your eMac should start up normally before you experienced any problem. If you still have problems, please respond back and I will be glad to assist you. Good Luck!

EMac freezing

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