IMac: Fried or not?

Question

I've had this problem happen to me a coupla times, but never thought much of it as it went away after a coupla reboots. It happens both in OSX and WinXP. The screen will lock up, and I have to reboot. After that, if I let it boot to OS X, the round dial will go round a bit, then I get the multi-language "You need to restart" box in the middle of the screen.
If i start up holding the alt key (to change the boot up volume), I get as far as it allowing me to move the mouse, and selecting the volume, and if I select WinXP, it will attempt to boot into that. And this is where it gets interesting: I can tell whether the WinXP boot sequence will be a success by the background-image of the WinXP loading screen: If it has a very faint, dark-burgundy-red (almost black) moiré effect, I'll know it won't be succesful, and it will just restart after some HD churning. When XP's "select safe mode" text comes up, the screen text is slightly garbled, with faint, light-grey horizontal lines through each character on the screen.
Also, when I try booting from the OSX Install discs (by holding C just after the boot-up chime), it will churn away on the DVD, before giving me the multi-lingual "Please reboot" window again, just as above.
Another thing: I mainly have WinXP to play Valve's Counterstrike game, with all the details turned up. Friend of mine mentioned maybe that's what's causing the problems.
So, can anyone tell me whether my iMac is fried?

Answer 1

"Also, when I try booting from the OSX Install discs (by holding C just after the boot-up chime), it will churn away on the DVD, before giving me the multi-lingual "Please reboot" window"
No, it's not fried:) Kernel panics can be caused by either hardware or software. Your kernel panics are apparently not caused by software, as your installed OS doesn't control a bootup from the install disc. Your install disc boot result seems to indicate that your kernel panics are hardware related. It would be best if you could confirm that result by repeating your attempted boot from the install disc. The further into the boot process that you can get prior to the kernel panic occurring, the more sound that conclusion would be.
If it is a hardware issue, this most likely means a RAM or hard drive issue. If your RAM is all original from Apple, your problem immediately becomes Apple's problem.
If the RAM is not Apple, or not all Apple, remove the non-Apple RAM and see if the kernel panics continue or stop. At this time there is no need to run any other tests on non-Apple RAM other than removing it from the system. That is the best test of RAM.
If the kernel panics stop and your iMac runs well, remove the Apple RAM and see if your iMac will run as well and without kernel panics when using only the non-Apple RAM.
Between running the Apple Hardware Test (while Apple RAM only is installed), and the "S.M.A.R.T. Status" reported in Disk Utility, that should be all you need to detect a faulty hard drive.
If you wish to further test the RAM, download and run the RAM test utility Memtest to give your RAM a good testing in addition to running the extended version of the Apple Hardware Test. Best to set both to run multiple cycles.
You can safely walk away from your iMac and leave it running either one. If the RAM is bad, Memtest might not even be able to complete its test - it'll just stop in the middle. It can move slowly, though, so don't mistake its slowness for a dead stop.
You can also check the "Diagnostics" subsection of System Profiler to see the most recent results of your iMac's startup self-test, as well as the last run of the Hardware Test. Best of luck with it:)
Message was edited by: myhighway