Dear Chaps,
I would be most grateful if you could advise me as to whether my much-loved 2.93 Ghz Quad-Core early 2009 Mac Pro is about to shuffle off it's mortal electrical coil. In recent weeks strange things have been happening. Firstly amusing screen glitches - from the occasional flurry of horizontal lines to the pleasantly surreal melting of a patch of text (all in random places I hasten to add). I was hoping that this might be the death throes of my aged Apple fitted ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB graphics card (ie something I could easily replace) but then other things started to occur.
Firstly open screens would freeze and prove unable to close and this wasn't necessarily because too much was open - this again could be random. However once this occurred even 'force quit' would prove useless and things could only be remedied by the pressing and holding of the start button to shut down the entire Mac. Occasionally this freeze would be accompanied by the speeding up of the fans into hovercraft mode. This cannot be good!
To begin with this might happen once a day but now it happens a few times throughout a day's use. However once it happens you might find yourself restarting into a few hours of undisturbed usage. More unnerving is the rarer recent occurrence (in the past week) of the Mac deciding to restart itself...sometimes successfully, sometimes into a white screen or more entertainingly into a futile cycle of useless restarts. The last time a collapse happened I forced a relaunch and got a report to Apple dialogue box featuring a ***Panic Report*** which I have a copy of should anyone know how to decipher it.
Now I'm not against buying a new 27" iMac, although it must be said that my wife and my bank manager might be. I also note with sorrow that I would lose all the joy of opening up and cleaning the thing myself and being able to add hard drives and PCI cards etc to my hearts content. And therein lies another problem. Back in 2014 I bought a 960GB Mercury Accelsior E2 card which helped my old 2009 Mac Pro no end. It was not cheap. But I now see that this will not slot into any of the new iMacs and I assume that this will be much the same for the 12GB of RAM I eventually added? So will it be worth me buying a new iMac and - for example - a Sonnet expansion chassis to avoid losing the PCI card? I assume yes?
So that's it chaps. Is it dying or simply pining for a new graphics card? Are other troubles always going to be looming on the horizon and therefore do I risk throwing away money by not moving on? Thanks! Nick
[doublepost=1452368332][/doublepost]I am by the way currently running Yosemite 10.10.5
I would be most grateful if you could advise me as to whether my much-loved 2.93 Ghz Quad-Core early 2009 Mac Pro is about to shuffle off it's mortal electrical coil. In recent weeks strange things have been happening. Firstly amusing screen glitches - from the occasional flurry of horizontal lines to the pleasantly surreal melting of a patch of text (all in random places I hasten to add). I was hoping that this might be the death throes of my aged Apple fitted ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB graphics card (ie something I could easily replace) but then other things started to occur.
Firstly open screens would freeze and prove unable to close and this wasn't necessarily because too much was open - this again could be random. However once this occurred even 'force quit' would prove useless and things could only be remedied by the pressing and holding of the start button to shut down the entire Mac. Occasionally this freeze would be accompanied by the speeding up of the fans into hovercraft mode. This cannot be good!
To begin with this might happen once a day but now it happens a few times throughout a day's use. However once it happens you might find yourself restarting into a few hours of undisturbed usage. More unnerving is the rarer recent occurrence (in the past week) of the Mac deciding to restart itself...sometimes successfully, sometimes into a white screen or more entertainingly into a futile cycle of useless restarts. The last time a collapse happened I forced a relaunch and got a report to Apple dialogue box featuring a ***Panic Report*** which I have a copy of should anyone know how to decipher it.
Now I'm not against buying a new 27" iMac, although it must be said that my wife and my bank manager might be. I also note with sorrow that I would lose all the joy of opening up and cleaning the thing myself and being able to add hard drives and PCI cards etc to my hearts content. And therein lies another problem. Back in 2014 I bought a 960GB Mercury Accelsior E2 card which helped my old 2009 Mac Pro no end. It was not cheap. But I now see that this will not slot into any of the new iMacs and I assume that this will be much the same for the 12GB of RAM I eventually added? So will it be worth me buying a new iMac and - for example - a Sonnet expansion chassis to avoid losing the PCI card? I assume yes?
So that's it chaps. Is it dying or simply pining for a new graphics card? Are other troubles always going to be looming on the horizon and therefore do I risk throwing away money by not moving on? Thanks! Nick
[doublepost=1452368332][/doublepost]I am by the way currently running Yosemite 10.10.5
