G5 hanging HELP

[iMax531]

I just got a new dual G5 which I am loving as best I can, which is hard because it is having a lot of problems.

It's all stock except for an extra 512 mb or RAM installed at an aple store by an apple rep, wtc, so that SHOULD all be fine....

First thing I did after turning it on for the first time was install Panther... and it froze in the middle of the second intall cd, twice. The third time I told it to do a complete wipe of the HD and instal panther, and then it installed fine. I though my problems were over.

But now, for no reason and seemingly totally randomly, it will just hang and I'll get a spinning beach ball for up to five minutes, and then it will click into gear and work fine, until it does it again. The only programs I have been running thus far have been AIM, Safari, iTunes, folding@home, appleworks and stickies, nothing too straining....

I can't figure out whats going on. Safari won;t even luanch right now... anyone have any idea what's going on?

thanks,

max

 

[e-coli]

You might have a bad install CD. I've heard people have been having problems with some of their discs (and only disk 2).

Might be worth sending out for replacement disks.

 

[Makosuke]

Two general-purpose suggestions:

1) Run the Apple Hardware Test CD if you haven't already. That might tell you something useful if there's a hardware problem.

2) Try pulling out one of your two pairs of RAM chips (either the new Apple ones or the ones that shipped with it). It doesn't matter who installed the RAM, there's always a chance of a stick being bad, and random freezes (though usually permanant ones or kernel panics) are a common symptom.

That said, if your computer stalls for a long time then kicks in again, it sounds like it's hanging on some sort of access timeout. Those were severe in 10.0 and 10.1, but I haven't seen any in Panther so far.

The most likely ones are network, peripheral, or the hard drive.

Try turning off the option to put hard drives to sleep in the Energy Saver PrefPane. If that helps, it's probably a funky hard drive (not normal behavior, though). You could also try turning off sleep entirely and see if that helps.

If you've got external hard drives attached, those are a likely culprit as well--firewire can act funny when the computer tries to sleep it, particularly older or cheap no-name-brand cases. Same goes for basically any peripheral--try unplugging everything Firewire or USB other than your keyboard and mouse and see if that helps.

Lastly, if you have any mounted Network shares, those are a very likely potential culprit. Do you have dedicated Internet access, like a cable modem? If so, try disconnecting it for a while, and see what that does. That might point to a background app misbehaving. If you have a modem, see if it happens when the modem is set to not dial automatically, and isn't connected.

Oh, and repair permissions if you haven't already. That never hurts.