Unstable iMac after 18 months. Any Clues?

[Spensaf]

Hi All,

I have had my 24" iMac since July '08 and never had any issues.

Over the last week I have had severe hanging issues and delayed "beach-ball" appearances that eventually clear, sometimes after a few seconds, sometimes it take minutes.

It seems to worse in the afternoon, after being used for the day.

I am getting a "Debugger () was called!" message in my console frequently.

Yesterday afternoon it was so bad that I had to press the power button to reset and it took ages to re-boot after powering back up.

Does anyone know of any diagnostic software to see if I can narrow my problem down to Hardware or Software issues?

Any other help would be appreciated too.

Thanks in advance.

 

[scroto]

Please be a little more specific as far as OS and hardware configuration and any recent hardware upgrades ect and I'm sure someone will help you.

 

[Maserati7200]

If I were you I would do the following

1) Repair Disk permissions
2) If that didn't work, re install OSX.

Good luck

 

[knewsom]

There are a few things you can do before completely reinstalling your OS, but you do need to post more info about your system - RAM, OS, etc.

Things you can do now: Repair disk permissions, if that doesn't fix it, reboot from the apple hardware test CD and run the extended test. If it passes, you may want to try and see if it's your OS - instead of wiping your HD, see if there's enough room to make a second boot partition. INstall the OS on that partition and give it a try. If it's still unstable, you either have a bad HD, or a hardware problem that the AHTCD won't catch, and you'll need to bring it to a genius.