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Balloon of Death

A

Atlasland

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Aug 20, 2005
317
0
London, UK
I'm starting to get really sick of the Balloon of Death. My iMac is timing out so often now, that its starting to feel like a windows machine. I even have to restart on a pretty regular basis these days

And today, for the first time, I'm actually in danger of loosing work - as Word has just frozen whilst I was trying to save my document.

I have a 2.0Ghz PPC iMac with 2GB RAM. The machine is 2.5 years old, and has been lovingly looked after.

I like to multitask, but right now I only have Opera, Preview, Word & iTunes open. My machine should bloody well be able to deal with that - right?

Any suggestions to help my machine play better - or even help save my word document???
 
I have the same computer, with 1 GB less RAM. ...That behavior is definitely not normal.

Have you tried checking Activity Monitor to look for unwanted processes that may be taking up the majority of your resources?
 
The only program I have EVER had freeze on me was Word, and that was for a HUGE document I was working on (+60 pages, full of images and text boxes).

You should have autorecover that will give you most of the document back, but when it froze on me, I had literally just saved it, so although I had to force quit, I lost nothing.

It might be that your hard drive is getting full. Have you checked that?
 
Activity Monitor doesn't throw up anything unusual. And I have 98.83GB of free space, so that isn't an issue.

Oh, and immediately after I posted this thread, my entire machine froze, and I had to do a hard power down - I instinctively went for the Crtl+Alt+Del combo, but then remembered I wasn't actually on a Windows machine(!). 2nd restart of the day.

And as I had autorecover turned off, I lost the document.

Any other suggestions?
 
I'd say go the genius bar. You don't want to have any more annoying problems or lose anything else important.
 
Well I repaired permissions, repaired the disk, and did an archive and install.

Seems a little better - I'll give it a little time to see if there's been a genuine improvement. If not - I'll go off to tech support (I should still have 6 months on my Applecare).

Thanks for the replies.
 
Sounds exactly like the kind of behavior I saw with a bad logic board on a mini and an eMac. It was intermittent, and got worse and worse.
 
NintendoFan said:
Sounds like the hard drive might be on the way out.
Click to expand...

My hard drive just crapped out in my iMac (one revision newer than yours) it had the same issues you're describing. If you've got the cash, I'd take it down to a tech place that services macs though, just to make sure it's not something else.

If I were you I wouldn't try to replace the hard drive yourself. It's rather annoying. Not too difficult, just annoying.
 
I would say run a check disk (not sure how to do that in a mac cause I never owned one) but it REALLY sounds like a failing harddrive. (Like the 7 that are on my desk at the moment....)
 
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