My IMAC G5 sounds like it has a squirrel chattering in it...

...when I get the SBBOD (spinning beach ball of death), and often, when it is just doing average processor things. I've been having this problem for over a year. I purchased it in Nov. 04, and by Nov 05 it had completely crashed. I had to bring it into the apple store and the genius took 5 hours (working continuously--she was great), to back up my data, wipe out my HD and reinstall everything. With new back up La Cie HD, I returned home "good as new". At least for a while! Slowly, the same things began to happen. Machine began running slowly for basic requests, SBBOD reappears often, and the squirrel (or chipmunk) sound has returned.
I repair permissions often (monthly or more often), just had it back in to the apple store to replace the power supply (completely shut down on me), and although they ran all sorts of diagnostics on it, they thought it was fine. They can't hear the "squirrel" noise--they claim their environment is noisy.
I get worried that it will crash again. Has anyone else had these problems? I'm still running Panther 10.3.9, and am afraid to upgrade to Tiger with all this stuff going on.
Would love any advice you can give. I just turned off "sleep", hoping that will help too.
Thanks!
IMAC G5   Mac OS X (10.3.9)   1.8 GHx PowerPC G5 with 1.5 GB DDR SDRAM

Welcome to Discussions - you soound as if you have a Rev A that should qualify under the Apple Repair Extension Program. Call Apple immediately and tell them what's going on. Since you just had a repair (probably under the Extension Program), your machine is still warranted, even if you don't have Apple Care. It may take a bit of polite pushing on your part, but be persistent and see if they won't send someone to you home to listen to the computer in its normal environment. In the meantime, keep making regular backups and let us know how you make out.
Miriam

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