Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

For those affected by iMac (AL) freezing issues, do you have 3rd party RAM installed?

  • Yes

    Votes: 50 17.3%
  • No

    Votes: 77 26.6%
  • N/A (not freezing, don't have an aluminum iMac)

    Votes: 162 56.1%

  • Total voters
    289
In fact i am quite surprised how much faster and smother it runs compared to the freezer....

I am in total agreement!!! After having a 'freezer' since early September and comparing it to my new non-freezer; I too am convinced I had a hardware failure
 
Am home from work and the freezing has started again with a vengeance.

Is it too late for me to try and get this machine swapped out for a replacement? Its a launch machine and I'm in the UK. How would I go about it if its possible?
 
It's clearly been a hardware issue all along and no amount of apologists can change that. The attitude of Apple here is nothing short of despicable; a lack of 'proper' official announcements (not just low-down admin staff talking to obscure tech sites) but also trying to weasle their way out of a recall costing customers time and money waiting for these pathetic 'fixes' that only have a blunderbus effect - churn enough out and someone somewhere may be sorted by it.

Talk about shaft your punters.
 
I have to phone my local repair agent and drop my machine off to them to be "fixed". The guy didn't seem to know anything about the problem, so it was a waste of 30 minutes on the phone tbh.

If you have the problem, don't bother phoning Apple, just book your machine in to your local Applestore/authorised repair place.

Very annoying.
 
I have to phone my local repair agent and drop my machine off to them to be "fixed". The guy didn't seem to know anything about the problem, so it was a waste of 30 minutes on the phone tbh.

If you have the problem, don't bother phoning Apple, just book your machine in to your local Applestore/authorised repair place.

Very annoying.

Oh, yeah. Because having no prior record of you having this problem by not calling Apple is going to help.
 
Oh, yeah. Because having no prior record of you having this problem by not calling Apple is going to help.

Its not going to make a blind bit of difference according to the guy on the phone. Apple still haven't made it a major issue on their systems. When I phoned up I was expecting him to say "yip, the freezing issue, we're aware of that. What we can do is.....". But no.

I have to phone the local repair centre myself and make a new appointment to leave my machine with them. The guy has said he's not updated anything on their systems as there's no point until the repair agents have had a look at it.
 
Its not going to make a blind bit of difference according to the guy on the phone. Apple still haven't made it a major issue on their systems. When I phoned up I was expecting him to say "yip, the freezing issue, we're aware of that. What we can do is.....". But no.

I have to phone the local repair centre myself and make a new appointment to leave my machine with them. The guy has said he's not updated anything on their systems as there's no point until the repair agents have had a look at it.


The difference is, eventually Apple can go "Oh I see you've called 4 times on this issue!".. and then of course if enough people log their complaint they may see a pattern.
 
Received Leopard today (UTD). Thought I'd give it a shot (if it locks up all the time, I can actually prove the freezing). Instead of updating, I chose a clean install.

Anyway, during the installation, small artifacts were showing at the menubar, but it didn't freeze. Installation ended after about half an hour, the computer rebooted, showed the funky "welcome" movie (God, I hate that song). After the movie, a window popped up to pick the country, but couldn't actually pick anything since the computer froze. I rebooted, the movie played again (God really must hate me), the movie ended and I saw a faded glimpse of the select-country-window, but the computer had frozen again. I rebooted yet again, the movie played yet again (this time I muted my speakers), window pops up, and by Zeus! It worked.

Anyway, onwards to the desktop, artifatcs were showing here and there, but nothing too major. I installed all the updates (yes, I like russian roulette) but the computer froze when I hovered over the dock right after boot. So I did another reboot, followed by a PRAM reset, got back in Leopard and no artifacts showing!

I played around a bit with Front Row, Fired up Arabesque screensaver for about 2 minutes. Spammed the dock with my cursor (and coverflow as well), Played WoW a bit in fullscreen with all settings max'd (excluding AA), no artifacts or freezing. Now I'm typing here while throwing my mouse around over the dock, still no artifacts nor freezing.

I expected worse tbh, I was preparing myself for a whole night of frustration with a freeze every 5 minutes.

Now, I do know that I still have a freezer, though, and I'll keep waiting for a bit to see if Apple comes up with something.
 
The difference is, eventually Apple can go "Oh I see you've called 4 times on this issue!".. and then of course if enough people log their complaint they may see a pattern.

He never opened a case though, which was strange. Its hard to know what Apple are thinking about this one though, they're certainly playing their cards close to their chest.

Luckily I'm off on holiday over this weekend so I might drop my iMac in before I leave and see what the verdict is.
 
No more screne artifacts or freezing!

I had a iMac that until a day ago would freeze and would also give strange scene artifacts. Problems started after it had been running a while, Front Row would cause a definite freeze if scrolling through photo folders quickly. I would also have the same problem running windows through Bootcamp.

Now all of a sudden no problems what so ever and I have been deliberately gone out of my way to try and get the system to crash but to no avail.

Not sure what has happened, had problems right up until I downloaded the updates with regard to Quicktime and some other program. Now my system is just fine (fingers crossed). Did Apple slip some other updates in there or did some update happen that I did not catch?

Anyone else notice the same?

Steken
 
I had a iMac that until a day ago would freeze and would also give strange scene artifacts. Problems started after it had been running a while, Front Row would cause a definite freeze if scrolling through photo folders quickly. I would also have the same problem running windows through Bootcamp.

Now all of a sudden no problems what so ever and I have been deliberately gone out of my way to try and get the system to crash but to no avail.

Not sure what has happened, had problems right up until I downloaded the updates with regard to Quicktime and some other program. Now my system is just fine (fingers crossed). Did Apple slip some other updates in there or did some update happen that I did not catch?

Anyone else notice the same?

Steken

I had the same. It can go for days with nothing and then it will die every few minutes and then again days with nothing. Update 1.2.1 came out as well but its not been overly successful going by what I have read.
 
If it is a driver issue that would explain why I sometimes get random lockups in Mac OS but when I boot into Windows I don't.

I'll never understand why Apple went with ATI. They have a history of buggy drivers.
 
Actually, ATi has a much longer history on the Mac than nvidia.
I'l agree that ATi Windows video drivers have historically been less stellar.

The video drivers (and hardware) on my 24" alu iMac seem excellent.
Quake3 timedemo at standard HQ settings returns a score 750fps(!)
 
New update..... worse

Sorry if this is a repeat, but I loaded the new update (on my August 2.8gHz iMac), ans it seemed a lot faster.... going on this good news I loaded Leopard and the machine is now almost completely unusable. I crashed 9 times in the first 50 minutes of use. It took me 3 attempts to send an email to Applecare.. freezing continously. Getting really pis*ed off here.
 
AppleCare has a mail address? :O

Well, I bit*hed so much about my two new iMacs freezing they opened an email dialogue with me to help sort it out. Not much use so far tho'. I suspect I'm going to have to reinstall Tiger after all the freezing yesterday evening.... such a pain. I have to teach 3 days a week and this is just killing me trying to get my work done.
 
Email from Steve

Emailed Steve Jobs. He actually replied, get this:

There is an iMac software update coming late this week that should fix the problems. Sorry, and thanks for your patience.

Steve

Sent from my iPhone

Thanks, Steve!

:)
 
Emailed Steve Jobs. He actually replied, get this:

There is an iMac software update coming late this week that should fix the problems. Sorry, and thanks for your patience.

Steve

Sent from my iPhone

Thanks, Steve!

:)


Thats quite impressive I guess. As it certainly isn't what happened when I emailed him.
When did you get the reply? Im assuming/hoping hes talking about another update. IE, 1.2.5/1.3.5 for example, and not the ones we got last week.
 
The email was sent yesterday morning, and I got a reply sometime last night. This would be referring to another update, beyond the 1.2, 1.2.1, or 1.3 (al) updates.

Made my day.
 
Made my day.

Yeah thats a nice result :) When I emailed him about the issue, I was promptly contacted by a lady from Apple Executive Relations in Ireland. She was infinitely more helpful than those AppleCare chumps however, so I was content enough with that.
 
freezing issues

since installing the 1.3 update on my 2.8ghz imac, the temperature at the top of the imac metal casing has dropped by about 20 degrees celcius, making me think that apple have dropped the clock speeds of the gpu and/or cpu to try and fix the crashes. the fans aren't noticeably running louder or more often, but using temperature monitor, the temps of the cpus and gpus are down around 35-35C instead of the 60C-70C before the udpate.
 
Emailed Steve Jobs. He actually replied, get this:

There is an iMac software update coming late this week that should fix the problems. Sorry, and thanks for your patience.

Steve

Sent from my iPhone

Thanks, Steve!

:)

No offense, but this is coming from someone with 2 posts on this website...

Not exactly a "trusted" source.
 
since installing the 1.3 update on my 2.8ghz imac, the temperature at the top of the imac metal casing has dropped by about 20 degrees celcius, making me think that apple have dropped the clock speeds of the gpu and/or cpu to try and fix the crashes. the fans aren't noticeably running louder or more often, but using temperature monitor, the temps of the cpus and gpus are down around 35-35C instead of the 60C-70C before the udpate.

No change in temperatures on my 2.8 since the updates. Still 40-50 C for CPU, 50-60 for GPU and 60-70 for power supply. All is ok on that side.
 
Well, I have spoken with people 'in the know' at Apple and a software update is coming sometime between 10pm tonight and Wednesday evening. The issue is the video card driver without a doubt.

It is speculated that there is a problem with the timing of the video card driver coming online during boot up. I have noticed that if you get artifacts at the log in screen it will crash.

For all of you who are sending your Imacs back for a video card swap.. Don't do it. Wait until Wednesday. Insiders are confident the next update will fix the problem.

:D

Well. Its Wednesday evening. Was 1.2.1 the big fix? If it was, it didn't.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.