Imac locking up every 5 min

[jgaz]

Hi,

I have a 24" Imac that I bought in the summer of 2008. It has the 3.06 GHZ processor, 4 gbs ram, 1TB HD and the Nvidia 8800 gs video card. About a week ago it locked up while I was installing divx for some videos I am working. The beachball of death started spinning, I let it sit for almost 4 hours and it never worked itself out. The mouse still moves but the screen it totally locked up and the music stops(if some is playing) every time this happens. I repaired premissions and repaired the disk with disk utility (strangely when running disk utility it does not lock up) then even made a disk image of my HD with disk utility just in case the HD is failing. I also ran the hardware test from the startup disk, it found nothing. It usually locks up within 20 mins of being turned on, even if i just turn it on and leave it, running no programs. Any ideas what might be going on?

Thanks

 

[ljonesj]

The hard drive may be going out u May have some bad sectors that the mac is hitting and or bad ram

 

[Hellhammer]

Sounds like RAM issue. Are you using original RAM or have you added it yourself? Does it lock up with certain application? Try restarting and leave it on for 30mins (don't open any apps) and see if it does it again

 

[jgaz]

Well i tried turning it on last night before bed without opening any applications.
It is still on, not frozen up. What might that mean? RAM? It does not seem to be connected to any specific program as it has locked up while in mail, itunes, safari, word. Also i have a windows partition and that side doesn't seem to be affected. If it were a bad section of the hard drive wouldn't it have had issues making an image of it in disk utility when it came across that section? The RAM is the original RAM that came installed in the computer by apple.

 

[Consultant]

Disk Utility:
- Verify Disk (repair if asked)
- Repair permissions

Otherwise
Archive and Install

 

[iMerlin]

I would Also try a cache cleaner like Snow Leopard cache cleaner. It also has a option to optimize ram which seems to help when my machine are acting up. Worth a try, isn't it?
I also use Onyx which is free. Both are great utilities.