Power Mac G4: making noises, freezing, and quitting

[mr100b]

Why does my computer freeze, sometimes for periods of up to 20mins, before quitting the running application (Explore most often, but it’s happened with pretty much every program I have) unexpectedly? The freezing is accompanied by a strange noise (like gears turning). Help!

What’s going on? How do I fix it? I'm running OS X Jag. if that helps.

Thanks

 

[steveedge]

Exploder

The Explorer problem is not just on your computer. It happens on my new mac mini running Tiger, It happened on my old G3, also on my wifes G4 and our G4 laptop...starting to see a pattern here ?
I HAVE to use Explorer because I build web sites and need to check them out in every browser but if I were just surfing, I would use Firefox and/or Safari.

The gear noise is probobly your hard drive, but I can't be sure of that.
You can get out of the freeze by hitting the escape key then quitting Exploder in the pop up then restart it..I do it 50 times a week...at least.

The other Applications may run better if you update to Tiger or at least make sure your system updates are current.
Also, when an application is "working" it sometimes appears to be frozen. I had that problem with big processor intensive apps often on my G3, a faster computer cured most of that.

Good Luck.

 

[mr100b]

Thanks, steveedge.

If there are any other thoughts on the matter ... Please.

Mr100b

 

[joker2]

Sounds like what was happening with my powerbook before the HDD died. After one of these 'freezing' sessions, run Disk Utility ( "Verify Disk" ) and check the S.M.A.R.T. status at the bottom of the screen. The S.M.A.R.T. status will only show up if you click on the root level of the drive, not your partition.

Alternately, get a program like Alsoft's DiskWarrior that can give you a report even when the drive isn't showing symptoms. (Mine wouldn't show the S.M.A.R.T. status as 'failing' after a cold boot, but the Genius at the Apple store ran DiskWarrior and it confirmed that the drive had issues.)

Disk Utility can be found in Applications --> Utilities