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Ugh! My Mac is acting like a windows machine

M

Mylstar

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 18, 2002
51
0
I have a PM G4, Dual 1Ghz w/ 2 gigs of ram. In the last 2 or 3 days a majority of my programs will shut down without warning...Word, Excel, Safari, IPhoto (had to remove a pref.folder in Library to get it working again). UT2003 quits after 2 or 3 minutes of playing.

I've been with Mac for about 10 months and now the experience is reminding me of using a peecee. I'm still new to OSX but is there anything I can do to prevent all these problems or reduce them?

Thanks!
 
-Mylstar

That is very odd. Clearly something in your system has changed that cases this instability - can you think about what that could be?

A new driver? For a wireless keyboard perhaps? Or wireless mouse?

A new app? A hack?

Nothing happenns without a cause. Clearly something has changed in your system to cause this. What you need to do is figure out if it is something you did - or somebody else.

One you eliminate users' influence causing this, then we need to "pop the hood" and see a little deeper. Like new RAM? Is it dusty? Overheating? Have you repaired permissions lately?

If all else fails, see about a Software Restore.
 
I suggest inserting the boot disk and booting from it. Then run disk utilites and fix preferences. This usually fixes a few problems.

I also suggest running fsck -y from the command line.

To do this, reboot your machine , and hold down the comand and s keys. It will boot to a text screen. At the prompt type in fsck -y Keep doing this until it says all files are ok.

Hope it helps.
 
i think "unexpectaly quit" is a thing mac-people do not like to talk about ... this can really make you crazy ... from time to time i am up to 16 hours on my mac (sick, isn't it :) and i have to say that illustrator10 is the most unstable, then word, fcp3, safari ... i hope for panther to get things right!
.a
 
Originally posted by .a
i think "unexpectaly quit" is a thing mac-people do not like to talk about ... this can really make you crazy ...
Click to expand...

I'd have to agree. I can't stand unexpected quits. iTunes has been flaking on me, plus Final Cut Pro, and other audio programs that I use. The only thing that these quits have going for them is that I don't have to reboot the machine as I would in OS 9....I, too, hope Panther offers more stability (or that updated programs offer more stability...whichever is more responsible).
 
Bad RAM causes more technical problems than people realize. Where did you purchase your RAM from. I've never heard of anyone using 2GiB of RAM before (and you must have purchased some of that from a reseller), so I would recommend checking out your sticks, maybe removing one of them if you have to troubleshoot.
I've seen Apple machines advertised with "up to 1GB of RAM." Maybe, though it sounds strange, you have more than the Operating System can recognize and use without messing itself up.
 
all my RAM was purchased at macsolutions.com over the last 10 months but all my problems have popped up in the last week or so. The only new thing I've added to the system is Unreal 2003.

I do have a G5 on order but that is on a 10 week lead time right now so I hoping to resolve these issues in the meantime.

15 years on a peecee was enough so now I'm a happy switcher. I even put the Apple logo sticker on my new truck and I was never one to put stickers on vehicles, so that should tell you something! :)
 
definitely check out your ram.

I know with PC's, that with BAD ram, running an intensive app like game/3dmark/prime/video editing that it can cause crashes to desktop or restarts.

Random restarts could also be PSU problems, but i don't think Mac's should ahve that problem b/c the general population is not exactly overclocking :)

I don't know if there's a Memcheck equivalent for the Mac...ask around I'm sure someone's more familiar with it than me.

[edit: Outdated bios could also lead to random restarts. An updated bios can obviously solve that problem--HOWEVER, b/c i'm not familiar with how the Mac works, is there even a "BIOS" equivalent? something that can tweak the underpinnings of the mobo?]
 
Originally posted by Marble
Bad RAM causes more technical problems than people realize. Where did you purchase your RAM from. I've never heard of anyone using 2GiB of RAM before (and you must have purchased some of that from a reseller), so I would recommend checking out your sticks, maybe removing one of them if you have to troubleshoot.
I've seen Apple machines advertised with "up to 1GB of RAM." Maybe, though it sounds strange, you have more than the Operating System can recognize and use without messing itself up.
Click to expand...
OS X can handle 2 GB of RAM easily, and the Mirrored Drive Door G4 towers can hold that much. Previous models were limited to 1.5 GB or less, but that's a non issue here. Back to the problem at hand. It sounds like the problem here is EXACTLY like one I had a few months back. It turned out that it was, in fact, a RAM issue. One of my DIMMs had somehow caught some static and a few bits of memory shorted out. A bad bit in your RAM can cause HUGE stability problems, and the OS generally doesn't react to it very well. I'd suggest pulling all of your RAM DIMMs from the tower and leaving one in. Then boot from the utilities cd that came with your Mac and run a 24 hour load test. Do this for each DIMM you have, one at a time. You'll likely find the culprit that way. It worked for me, and once I replaced the faulty chip everything was back to normal. Hope that helps. :)
 
I've had few problems with unexpected quits on OS X, but lately it's been happening with Safari 1.0. I would have thought that Apple would leave that dreaded OS 9 problem behind.
 
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